Black voters help gay marriage ban pass in California

Opponents claimed the ban was discriminatory and unconstitutional.

McClatchy Newspapers

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Cheryl Weston once attended a wedding ceremony for gay friends, but on Election Day, she voted for a constitutional amendment to declare marriage in California as only between a man and a woman.

“It was called a holy union, but I don’t know how holy it was,” said Weston, a Sacramento barber.

Weston, 44, is one of an overwhelming number — 70 percent — of black voters in California who voted for Proposition 8 and helped secure its passage, according to exit polling conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International.

Blacks, energized by Barack Obama’s presidential bid, boosted their numbers at the polls this year to 10 percent of the state’s electorate, up from 6 percent in 2004.

“The Obama people were thrilled to turn out high percentages of African Americans, but [Proposition 8] literally wouldn’t have passed without those voters,” said Gary Dietrich, president of Citizen Voice, a nonpartisan voter awareness organization.

Latinos were 18 percent of California’s voters, and through sheer numbers also contributed to Proposition 8’s success. But 53 percent of Latino voters supported the measure, a much lower percentage than black voters. Among white and Asian voters, 49 percent voted for the measure.

Opponents of Proposition 8 appealed to voters to reject the measure as discriminatory and unconstitutional.

But messages that opponents hoped would strike a chord with minority voters — and remind them that interracial marriage once was banned — collided with traditional religious views.

“You listen to the African American pastors, they do not buy that argument,” Dietrich said. “They do not believe at all that there is a correlation between civil rights vis-a-vis blacks and rights for gays.”

Divisions over gay marriage proved a challenge for black civil rights groups.

The Greater Sacramento Urban League took a stand against Proposition 8, which was the decision of its president, James Shelby, 66.

“I’m a Christian man,” he said. “But I’m also president of the Urban League, and the Urban League has always been a civil rights group. That’s what this organization was founded on.”

He said it wouldn’t be a sign of leadership to go out and “wave a flag and see how it blows” to take the pulse of the black community and then match that. “The law says that they have the right,” he said. “I think that the courts are ultimately going to be the ones to prevail on this.”

Sacramento NAACP President Betty Williams said her chapter was so divided it chose not to take a position on Proposition 8, although the California NAACP opposed it.