You can't have avoided hearing about race and Prop 8. I'm not repeating the coverage here. (I do recommend you read Richard Kim in The Nation.)
But have you heard this? 61% of people 65 and older voted for Prop 8. 61% of people under 30 voted against it. Click here for the full exit polling on Prop 8. So why no press coverage on this angle? The future is ours...and no amount of Mormon money or blatant disinformation will stop that.
And on the matter of race and sexual orientation...Thanks to Alex Blaze at Bilerico for pointing out that only 72% of self-identified lesbian, gay, and bisexual voters choose Barack Obama, while 77% voted for John Kerry in 2004. This is astonishing. Review the exit polls for 2004 and the exit polls for 2008, and you find that in 2008, more men, more women, more whites, more blacks, more latinos, more asians, more protestants, more catholics, and more jews voted for Obama than voted for Kerry in 2004. But fewer gay people did. What explains this do you think? There was no increase in the percentage of self-identified LGB voters; it was 4% in both 2004 and 2008. 2008 was an overwhelmingly democratic year, but more gay people picked McCain than picked Bush in 2004. Had Obama lost (heaven forbid!), could Obama supporters of all races have looked towards racism among gay people as a reason? Is there some other plausible explanation? Oh, and in the same post, Alex Blaze notes that a higher percentage of whites than blacks voted to ban unmarried couples from adopting in Arkansas, but you haven't heard anyone decry white homophobia there, have you?
Oh, and another demographic voting more for McCain in 2008 than for Bush in 2004...people over 65. Even in California, with its overwhelming support for Obama, only 48% of people over 65 voted for Obama; 50% voted for McCain.
I'm old enough to remember "Don't trust anyone over 30." Today at the very least we should think twice about the 65 and over crowd.
2 comments:
I stumbled on some rather racist comments in the discussion forum over at JoinTheImpact (the thread has been deleted). So, I decided to crunch some numbers. According to SFGate, 6,214,353 people voted Yes on Hate; 5,695,213 voted against it. Using the CNN exit poll data, I figured out that Prop 8 would have been stopped if all Asians who voted for 8 had voted against them; if all "others" would've changed their vote from Yes to No; or if less than a quarter of the pro-8 White voters had been more open-minded. Sure if half the African-Americans who voted for Prop 8 had voted against it, we would've stopped it, too. But the fact is that there isn't a clear cut racial divide as some people who are trying to stir up racist feelings are making us believe.
Actually, if only 6% of the White Yes on 8 voters had voted No - everything else being equal - Prop 8 would not have passed (literally with a 50% +1 vote). It would have taken 27% of the African-American supporters of Prop 8 to create the same swing.
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