SAME-SEX MARRIAGE/RACIAL DIVIDE

Have you ever heard of the National Organization for Marriage?  Well if you haven’t, you should!

NOM is the nation’s leading group fighting against same-sex marriage. Until last week, the Rev. Ralph A. Martino, senior pastor at First Church of Christ (Holiness) USA in Washington, D.C., had never heard of them either.  Although the black pastor has been a vocal opponent of same-sex marriage, he recently went public to announce his determination to never work with the organization.  Why, you ask? You see, a recent leak of the organization’s confidential memos revealed that it plans to defeat marriage equality campaigns by “fanning the hostility” between blacks and gays.  Hmmm…

“The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks — two key Democratic constituencies,” states one of the memos. “Find, equip, energize and connect African American spokespeople for marriage, develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots,” it continued.

In light of the leaked memo, a range of civil rights and lesbian, gay and bisexual advocacy groups have issued statements calling the strategies racist and cynical. The memos have also sparked a long overdue conversation about real tensions between black and gay rights groups, with members of both saying more dialogue is needed.

This is “a wake-up call,” said Michael Crawford, director of online programs for Freedom to Marry in New York, since it details how the group can exploit racial tensions to serve their own interests. He also pointed out that the National Organization for Marriage seems to believe that he — as a black gay male — does not exist.

Michael Crawford

“It’s like they’re trying to divide me from myself,” Crawford said. “But there is a huge overlap in these communities. And if NOM is so focused on dividing us, the LGBT community needs to do a much better job reaching out to the black community — not just on the issue of marriage but on a whole range of issues.”

Tension between the black and gay communities have been heightened for a while. In 2008, a majority of black voters in California supported the church led Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in the state. NOM seized on that moment, recognizing how easy it was to use the black church and its constituents to do their dirty work and mobilize the successful opposition of marriage equality.

Now, some black clergy are beginning to wake up and realize they’ve been had.  “If this is the type of weaponry a group uses in order to stir up warfare and foster division, then we’re not part of that,” Rev. Martino said. “This angle creates unnecessary drama and it will backfire.”