black evangelical political views

I think American society needs to figure out if its laws are supposed to grant rights or proscribe freedoms before this issue can be solved. It's completely asinine to me that people think they have the right to tell someone else who should be eligible beneficiaries of their health insurance or granted rights as next-of-kin, etc etc etc.

(xpost: yeah I guess Dan OTM (although what the hell would HE know about this issue anyway) ... Wow, I just ran out of middle fingers.)

uh, they live in the South?

Ethan I generally picture you with a knife in your teeth at all times. Make sure it's pointing outwards, though. SRSLY though, I think this shows the limitations of your CONFRONT mode. Why is it your issue? What are you really going to do? If you are pro-actively politically active, is there an opportunity for you to take this burden on? Or are you just talking about 'how do I get my head around this apparently contradictory information?'

xpost

So perhaps whatever you can do to confront/campaign against this kind of intolerance should done in a non-race-specific way. What you can actually do I dunno - how are you going to change people's views when they're based on pure prejudice/instinct/ignorance?

Hence gay marriage, an issue which has practically zero personal effect on the average voter, can -- yes -- swing something.

I'm not sure exactly what the question is here, though. If we're asking why an otherwise-progressive black population would have these beliefs, I'd say the reasons are pretty obvious -- in a lot of ways they're very much like their white evangelical counterparts. (And the ways in which they're different from their white counterparts link up pretty well with the "otherwise-progressive" part of their political beliefs.) If we're asking how much of a problem this is, or how liberals can address it, I suppose that's bigger, but the answers seem like the same boring ones as always: point the audience toward the things liberals can do for it, stress the basic socioeconomic importance of those things, respect the basis of those other beliefs but make sensitive reasonable arguments for why you believe something else, and try not to look like a tool with a rod up your ass clapping off-beat when the choir starts singing.

xpost w/ nitsuh roffles re: 'clapping off-beat when the choir starts singing' - oh kerry :-/

As for specific techniques in terms of linking these two issues to the black community (which for the record does think of itself as The Black Community plenty of the time):

(a) Break down perception of homosexuality as some sort of decadent white-people behavior by stressing the number of gay people within black communities, both urban and not, both present and historical. One huge thing here would be to have public and visible models of gay black people who aren't perceived as having flown the coop of blackness -- i.e., not rich folk or arty or showbiz (and not backlashed down-low). [Trickier argument that no one will make: that the down-low and all its worst consequences exist in some part because of a community that pushes same-sex sexuality into shady sidelines either way.]

(b) When forced to address abortion to this sort of audience, talk about empowerment and control for young black women in particular -- tell a tale of bootstrapping and infinite possibilities and explain how having reproductive control is essential to allowing black women to continue their upward rise into the middle class. Mingle this talk in terms of "responsibility" and having the opportunity to exercise that responsibility, starting in terms of birth control and sexual education and so on -- and then cast abortion as a regrettable end point. The focus: that the important part is for young black women to have the opportunity to change their lives.

so people who are rich, but don't have a 'rich' image, then?

uh, they live in the South?

-- gabbneb (gabbne...), April 19th, 2006.

^^^ predilection for conformity

That said, it obviously wouldn't hurt if an openly-gay friend-and-neighbor black man magically became famous for something.

Politicians are always promising black people economic power. Gay people are almost always richer than average and homosexual cities (like the #1 San Fran and NYC) are also the richest cities in America in terms of income per capita.

1. I say we take the really, really femme gay guys from San Fran, all the closeted actors in Los Angeles, the art freaks in NYC and the pedos in Massachusetts...

2. bus them into the inner cities to work and live...

3. ???...

4. Black America is the fastest growing economy in America.

What do you guys say?