Finger-pointing After Prop. 8 Outcome Sharply Sours an Otherwise Sweet Election

Like taking the college admission exam or studying for the bar, all the preparation, work, sweat, toil and tears had come down to just one day.

Tuesday would make the difference between elation and joy or sorrow and depression. Unfortunately, my blackout was interrupted by friends who called and a husband who rushed into my home office to tell me that Sen. Obama had won Pennsylvania and Ohio.

I relented.

At eight o’clock, I was rewarded with good news: the television networks declared that the country had elected its first African American president. The relief in our small two-person household was palpable.

We watched Sen. John McCain’s concession speech with barely restrained glee, happy to see the back of Gov. Sarah Palin. We watched our sparsely populated, dead-end block fill with neighbors and their dogs running up and down the street, whooping with joy. I talked to family and friends in New York and the District of Columbia, listening, over scratchy cell phones, to the outpouring in their streets as well.

Now I Can Relax, Right?

And we watched hundreds of thousands of people in Grant Park cry as President-elect Obama gave his victory speech. Echoes of the revolution that began there in 1968 were a distant memory.

When all that ended, I took a deep and satisfying breath thinking, Tonight, I will finally get a good night’s sleep.

Before I went to bed, I turned to the computer to check the Secretary of State’s website for results on various propositions, Nos. 2 and 8 being of most importance to me. When the California Secretary of State’s site failed to load, I settled for the Los Angeles Times, figuring they had access to information that I didn’t. And then it hit me – no one was willing to make a decision on passage of Prop. 8, the gay marriage ban. It was too close to call.

I Couldn’t Rest for Long

I went to bed that night uneasy – and again I had another night of fitful sleep. After tossing and turning for hours, at 4 o’clock my husband urged me to turn on the laptop and check the results. We lay in bed, lit only by the eerie blue glow of the laptop and learned that with 92 percent of the vote counted, it was very likely that Prop. 8 had passed.

While everyone appeared jubilant about the election of Sen. Obama, the California election results cast a pall over our house. I couldn’t shake the feeling that while one barrier in our country had fallen, several states, in the last gasp of (Karl) Rovian politics, had succumbed to narrow-mindedness and bigotry.

It was a depressing thought. Most of the day, I surfed from one website to another, trying to figure out how ‘No on Prop. 8’ went from a 14-point lead in the summer to losing in the general election. Were we all so distracted by Sen. Obama, who apparently had it in the bag, that we didn’t pay attention to what was going on in our own backyard? Did Democratic fundraising kill it by siphoning away necessary resources? I realized that I had given only a hundred dollars to Equality California, when Obama and the Democratic National Committee had claimed from me over a thousand.

Are Exit Polls Reliable?

Then the Los Angeles Times provided an answer – of sorts. Relying on the same sort of faulty exit polls that got us believing in the (probably non-existent) “Bradley effect,” and got the networks in hot water by prematurely calling the 2000 election for Al Gore, the newspaper concluded, first in one incendiary blog, then in a followup article: It’s the black people – we passed Prop. 8.

Then I did something I’ve never done since newspapers went the way of the blog – I read the comments. One person after another railed against African Americans. We voted for your President. Why didn’t you vote for our civil rights? many proclaimed. As the victims of so much discrimination, others wrote, we should have voted against Prop. 8.

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I put down my shoes and purse – nixing my plans to go to West Hollywood for the protest – and picked up my pencil and calculator. Assuming, for a minute that the exit polls were true (a dubious premise), I scratched out calculations on a piece of notebook paper. My conclusion – as blacks make up only 10 percent of the California voting population, we weren’t the people who put Prop. 8 over the top. Whites and Latinos had a much bigger part to play. Yet the blame has been placed at our feet. Not days after an historic election, when Americans appeared to come together for the first time in years, the politics of divide and conquer have reared their ugly head. Between two minority groups, no less.

Who Was the Bigger Victim?

I am not even going to start down the road of comparing one person’s struggle with another. As a descendent of slaves and sharecroppers who escaped from the South in the dead of night, in my biased opinion, blacks always win the “who has it worse?” game. (Sometimes I give the title to Native Americans or Jews, depending on how I’m feeling about small pox, the Trail of Tears, or the Holocaust on a particular day.) But that’s just semantic gamesmanship, not the genesis of true progress. Cynical though I may be, I still believe people need to come together to recognize their similarities rather than tear each other apart.

Instead, as I read on, it became apparent that now the blame game has extended to President-elect Obama. Many say his stance on gay marriage was far too milquetoast. I wholeheartedly agree. This is the single reason I did not support him early in the primary season. There were other progressive candidates who supported the rights of gays to marry. (Hillary Clinton was not among them.) But when a political party comes together around a candidate, they compromise or lose. Politicians, by their very nature, pander to the lowest common denominator – which now includes the Rust Belt and the ‘New’ South – and principles always get lost along the way.

How Can You Reasonably Blame Us?

Is that compromise our fault? I hardly think so. If a majority of a small minority of the electorate voted one way on this issue of gay marriage, so be it. Perhaps some of us black folks can be persuaded to think about this in another way. I don’t know, because I don’t know these people personally. But before delving into the vilification of African Americans as a group, perhaps those who set out to persuade a majority of the population that gay rights matter should start in their own backyard.

The finger-pointing and name-calling so soon after Nov. 4 made what could have been a very wonderful, sleep-filled week, bittersweet.