The (Artificial) War Between Blacks and Gays

No one has more astutely captured the absurdity of the post-election-post-Prop 8-passage "war" between blacks and gays than Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report. Ever since the right wing got wind of a rift between blacks and gays following the big black Yes vote on California's Prop 8, they have been frothing at the mouth to fan the racial flames and start a new culture war that will pit minority against minority and make gay people as scary as they find black people. (Black gay people must be truly terrifying to the white right.) Evangelical wingnut Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, did it the other day with Anderson Cooper on AC360, and Bill O'Reilly can't get enough of the black/gay divide. Nothing makes him more orgasmic than setting up a scapegoating mud wrestling match between the scary blacks and the scary gays.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are moving on. Gay people, white and black, and our allies, white and black, are protesting Prop 8 (and other anti-gay measures passed on election day) across the country, including a nationwide protest November 15. We are speaking out against the Mormon Church (who knew the Mormons are black?!), the big power and money behind Prop 8. We are boycotting businesses that devalued their gay clientele by supporting a discriminatory proposition that shouldn't have been put up for popular vote in the first place. As blowhards like O'Reilly seek to manufacture a distracting culture war, sane straight people like Whoopi Goldberg (who, shockingly, is black!) are speaking out against the real culprit, injustice.

You know something's funny in the world when you compare O'Reilly's clip and Colbert's clip, and Colbert comes off as the rational one. So let the losing right, who's looking for shit to stir up since that's all they've got at the moment, keep fanning the flames. It makes for excellent comedy. The rest of us would be wise not to take the racial bait.