Revolution #102, September 23, 2007
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Barack Obama’s Poisonous “Advice” on Gay Marriage
In early August, at a forum on gay issues, Barack Obama tried to explain his refusal to support gay marriage on the following basis:
According to August 10 Chicago Tribune, Obama noted “that his parents' interracial marriage would have been ‘illegal’ in many Southern states at the time of his birth in 1961.” In fact, interracial couples not only faced outlawing, but harassment and beating; and Black men often faced lynching. The legal banning of interracial marriage sanctioned and gave legitimacy and force to a larger social relation of white supremacy, enforced both by law and rope. And this particular legal ban rested on and reinforced the basic ideological foundation of white supremacy—that Black people were inferior and were to be considered and treated as less than human beings, and that their most intimate relations and choices could be and must be controlled by whites.
But Obama, according to the Tribune, still “said that he would have advised the civil rights movement at the time not to focus on miscegenation laws, an inflammatory issue then. ‘I would have probably said it's less important that we focus on an anti-miscegenation law than we focus on a voting rights law and a non-discrimination and employment law and all the legal rights that are conferred by the state,’ Obama said.”
Well, that WAS what the politicians and capitulationists of those days said. But, fortunately, the masses of people didn’t listen back then.
And the masses shouldn’t listen today, either.
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