Why I think the approval of gay marriage in Washington, D.C., will stick

Allahpundit over at Hot Air is pondering why the vote to approve gay marriage by the City Council in Washington, D.C., today was so lop-sided in favor, 11-2, with ex-crackhead-and-adulterer Marion Barry casting one of the opposing votes, when D.C. is a majority black city and blacks have reneged on their support for equality for homosexuals that they promised when they were down and we were all part of a rainbow coalition.

Blacks support homosexual equality when it is framed as a civil rights issue, but greedy black ministers hell-bent on nation-building, especially those inspired by Black Liberation Theology, want everyone under their influence to be making babies, because numbers are power in a democracy, so they have re-branded the issue of homosexual equality to one of morality and succeeded in turning the black community against the gay community.  (Also, don’t tell anyone, but I think a lot of the antipathy black ministers stir up against homosexual equality is a way to denounce whites and Jews by proxy, since the openly gay and lesbian community is predominantly white. Plus, homosexuality is the one safe sexual topic any minister, of whatever race, can denounce these days from the pulpit without getting laughed at — think masturbation — or making parishioners so angry they walk out and never come back — think fornication and adultery. It’s just not safe to shame people any more, by cracky.)

Gays and lesbians wholeheartedly supported and support black civil rights and I think our community still has not processed the level of betrayal we have experienced at the hands, pulpits and podiums of people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who disappears every color but black from the rainbow coalition now whenever he talks of civil rights and the claims of women and other minorities to equality.

Well, I lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, just across the border from D.C., from 1983 to 2002, and I think I can tell you why the D.C. City Council voted in favor of gay marriage: gays and lesbians in D.C. are extremely active politically and very, very generous donors. What this means is that gays and lesbians have parties and invite D.C. City Council members AND THEY SHOW UP because it gets them votes, campaign workers and campaign donations. But it also means that we have gotten to know them and they have gotten to know us. So the conservatives who think they can defeat same-sex marriage equality by demonizing gays and lesbians to the D.C. City Council, or anyone else in a city where everybody really does know everybody, ARE OUT OF THEIR MINDS.

Gays and lesbians have worked their asses off to make Washington, D.C., a better place — not just for gays and lesbians, but for everyone. Just one example is that when I founded a group in the early 1990’s for gay and lesbian computer users, to help out gay rights organizations, and Giant had its program for donating computers and equipment based on the value of the receipts turned in, one member got us organized to collect from the gay community our Giant grocery store receipts to donate to a junior high school in a disadvantaged area with mostly black pupils. Gays and lesbians have done — and are doing — this type of community-building out of a genuine belief in equality for other minorities and because we will always BE a rainbow community.

I wish the leaders of the organizations working for gay and lesbian civil rights would see that the success of same-sex marriage equality in Washington, D.C., has to do with the love, passion, friendliness, kindness, idealism, hard work and generosity of the gay and lesbian community and the fact that so many people in D.C. have gay and lesbian friends that it is hard for any demagogue to demonize us successfully — and that they use this model everywhere we are working for our equality to be recognized in law.