Not to beat a dead horse, but this op-ed column from the LA Times (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ehrenstein31oct31,0,4417577.story?coll=la-tot-opinion&track=ntothtml) gives perhaps some of the best analysis as to why Obama really screwed up with the McClurkin disaster. It will be interesting to see if he can redeem himself with those in the LGBT community. Watching him in the debate last night, I truly do not feel that Obama is anti-gay. I do, however, wonder how hard he would push for gay rights if elected. Here are highlights from the column:
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But what's really on Obama's mind isn't LBGT Americans. It's black voters. With so much of the African American vote snugly in Hillary Clinton's pantsuit pocket, the Illinois senator clearly is hoping to make inroads before South Carolina's crucial 2008 primary.
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The offspring of a Kenyan father and a white American mother, Obama was raised in Hawaii and Indonesia without much churchgoing until he grew up and ran for office. So he is not only a generation but a world away from the political leadership most of us African Americans have come to know. Putting on Baptist drag and staging a gospel music show is precisely the sort of pandering Obama had scrupulously avoided. Until now.
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Now a gospel star may have driven a wedge between Obama and his gay supporters and roiled others as well. For, by putting McClurkin in the spotlight, Obama has broken black America's 11th Commandment: "Don't talk about it in front of the white people!"
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Black churches are so much at the center of African American public life, and so much in denial about the gays and lesbians in their pews and choir stalls. As the late Marlon Riggs said in "Tongues Untied," his acclaimed 1990 documentary about gay blacks and AIDS, "How many choir directors have to die before we know who we are?" The "Embrace the Change" lineup reflects how this struggle is far from over. McClurkin, who is a minister at an evangelical church in New York, calls homosexuality a "choice" -- needless to say the wrong one. The duo Mary Mary claims to love gays in a love-the-sinner kind of way, equating us with murderers or prostitutes. It is only Byron Cage of the Mighty Clouds of Joy who has been actively working to heal the gay-straight divide.
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Gays played pivotal roles in African American history, but the community continues to wish away their sexuality. Blues legends Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter and Ethel Waters all took female lovers. (Impresario Leonard Reed once said Waters was "so mean she married her second husband to spite her girlfriend when she found out she was sleeping with him.") Gay composer Billy Strayhorn gave the Duke Ellington Orchestra its sound, including its theme song, "Take the A Train." The fabled Harlem Renaissance was, frankly, a gay and lesbian movement led by the likes of Zora Neale Hurston, Bruce Nugent and Langston Hughes.
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Over and above all these towers James Baldwin, the novelist and essayist whose accounts of the civil rights movement are without peer, and Bayard Rustin, the most important civil rights figure after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Rustin conceived of the 1963 March on Washington, but thanks to a vice arrest in Pasadena a decade earlier, he was forced to take a back seat during the unveiling of his masterpiece.Coretta Scott King never forgot Rustin's sacrifice and went on to support the gay-rights movement. Her daughter, however, the Rev. Bernice King, joined a 2004 march against same-sex marriage.
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And so we now find Obama trying, as it were, to court both branches of the King family. It won't work. And his continued relevance to gay and lesbian African Americans is over.
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Personally, I find it ironic that blacks as a whole, including the (in my view extremely biased) judge who heard the property settlement portion of my divorce, are incensed when faced with discrimination against them, yet are far more likely than other domestic racial groups to be discriminatory against LGBT individuals. One would think that victims of discrimination would be a bit more less discriminatory towards other minority groups.
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