Nate Silver over at 538 has a post that argues against the assertion that the “Obama voters” (read non-white) were responsible for prop 8’s passage.

At the end of the day, Prop 8’s passage was more a generational matter than a racial one. If nobody over the age of 65 had voted, Prop 8 would have failed by a point or two … The good news for supporters of marriage equity is that — and there’s no polite way to put this — the older voters aren’t going to be around for all that much longer, and they’ll gradually be cycled out and replaced by younger voters who grew up in a more tolerant era. 

Read it and be reassured.

I may be depressing some of you with my recent posts which have offered criticism of the Obama transition team’s hiring decisions. I’m not anti-Obama (far from it!), I just want us all to be realistic about what’s happening, and to apply what pressure we can to keep things moving in the right direction.

I also want to give credit where credit is due. This is from the transition team’s official website, change.gov:

The Obama-Biden Transition Project does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or any other basis of discrimination prohibited by law. (Emphasis added)

Right on.

Dan Savage highlights some disturbing exit poll data:

African American voters in California voted overwhelmingly for Prop 8, writing anti-gay discrimination into California’s constitution and banning same-sex marriage in that state. Seventy percent of African American voters approved Prop 8, according to exit polls, compared to 53% of Latino voters, 49% of white voters, 49% of Asian voters.

The Mormon Church ran a deceitful campaign that, among other lies, claimed that Barack Obama supported Proposition 8. While Obama clearly stated his opposition to Prop 8, he did so rather quietly. He also confused the matter by also stating unequivocally that he opposes gay marriage.

African-American turnout was considerably higher due to Obama’s candidacy and effective ground game. Obama’s failure to vigorously and clearly oppose Proposition 8 is all the more disheartening in the light of these numbers.

[Update: 11/07/2008 5:45 pm]
I have been properly schooled by Shanikka over at My Left Wing. I think her most powerful points are that, (a) the CNN exit poll data was small, non-random, and unlikely to be anywhere near accurate (she has ample reasons in her post, which I find convincing); and, (b) given the number of African-Americans in California, a shift in their voting pattern on Question 8 is unlikely to have changed the final outcome. She also properly notes that we’re not going to triumph by being divisive and pointing fingers, and I agree. We need to confront racism in the LGBTQ world, and we need to confront homophobia wherever we find it; and people of conscience need to come together to fight for justice.

Courtesy of our friends at the Public Service Administration:

My man (?) IOZ offers his take on the nature vs. nurture debate (and I happen to agree!):

But sexuality isn’t the same as race (well, even race isn’t the same as race), and though it, like all human behaviors, has genetic and hormonal antecedents, it is not mere biological determinism that causes me to suck cock. Predilection is not identity. Human sexuality does exist on a spectrum; its characteristics and emphases change even within the individual over the course of a lifetime. Some people have very stable sexual interests; others “oscillate wildly,” as goes the title of The Smiths’ song. The fight against discrimination based on sexual identity is categorically confused: sexuality doesn’t constitute an identity. It constitutes a portion of the totality of each autonomous individual identity, and the reason not to discriminate against those whose sexual tastes and practices diverge from your own is not that minority sexualities constitute a protected class, that like the color of one’s skin, the angle of one’s wrist is genetic and, goddamnit, queers are people too. It’s simply that fucking is none of your fucking business.

That’s Apple’s home page, above – they’re putting their opposition to California’s pernicious Proposition 8 front and center. Pretty ballsy for a big corporation, if you ask me, but totally in keeping with their corporate philosophy. It makes me wonder, though – what are we doing about Proposition 8?

Frankly, I haven’t done squat. I will admit that I personally don’t feel that the marriage fight belongs front-and-center in what used to be charmingly called the Gay Liberation movement. However, when an organized juggernaut of conservative and religious groups attempts to amend a state constitution to prohibit gay marriage, I get my back up.

Andrew Sullivan has been following the Prop 8 question pretty closely, and has a good post here. He quotes Nate Silver of the Five Thirty Eight polling site as putting Prop 8’s chances at 50-50!

I’m curious – any of you Californians involved in the No on 8 stuff?

More sad news out of Iraq this week:

The Baghdad coordinator of Iraqi LGBT has been assassinated, probably by one of the two religious militia .

Peter Tatchell of Outrage! issued the following statement at lunchtime:

This morning, I received news from Iraq that the coordinator of Iraqi LGBT in Baghdad, Bashar, aged 27, a university student, has been assassinated in a barber shop.

Militias burst in and sprayed his body with bullets at point blank range.

He was the organiser of the safe houses for gays and lesbians in Baghdad. His efforts saved the lives of dozens of people.

Bashar was a kind, generous and extremely brave young man – a true hero who put his life on the line to save the lives of others.

As Donald Rumsfeld put it so eloquently, “Freedom’s untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes.”

This one is definitely Not Safe For Work. Hilarious, however…
Read the rest of this entry »

Jerusalem mayoral candidate Arcadi Gaydamak, an Israeli-Russian businessman, said “When I’m elected mayor, I would die before allowing the pride parade to be held in Jerusalem.”

(h/t: the Angry Arab)

An interesting article pointed out to me by an old friend from college.  From the article:

You can’t isolate gay men as a puzzle or problem anymore. You have to see them as part of a bigger, stronger, enduring phenomenon.

I’ve always thought that hundreds of thousands or millions of years of evolution didn’t result in homosexuality accidentally.  We get into trouble when you look at single instances of our human population in isolation.  I like to think of humans not as individuals, but as a large organism that exists and adapts over many generations.  Like a forest crawling up the raw slope of a recent mountain landslide.  Each human or tree is quite inconsequential on its own.

 http://www.slate.com/id/2194232/