African-Americans were a key
demographic in helping approve a gay marriage law in Maryland,
reversing previous trends.
Seventy percent of blacks voted in
favor of California's gay marriage ban, Proposition 8, when it passed
in 2008. And surveys from the Pew Research Center found in 2008 and
2009 that only 28 percent of African-Americans backed the
institution.
Those statistics led the National
Organization for Marriage (NOM), the nation's most vociferous
opponent of gay marriage, to heavily target the demographic.
In a two-pronged strategy to defeat
marriage equality at the polls and boost Mitt Romney's presidential
aspirations, NOM supported a group of African-American religious
leaders who condemned President Barack Obama's May endorsement of gay
nuptials.
“So the president has forgotten the
price that was paid [by civil rights activists],” Bill Owens of the
Coalition of African-American Pastors (CAAP) said during a press
conference. “Where people died, where they suffered, where they
gave their blood to have equal rights in the United States. And for
the homosexual community and for the president to bow to the money as
Judas did to Jesus Christ is a disgrace and we're ashamed.”
In a blog post, Equality Matters'
Carlos Maza called CAAP “a NOM front group.”
“CAAP is little more than a front
group for NOM, which has an interest in driving the media narrative
that being African-American is somehow incompatible with supporting
marriage equality,” Maza
wrote.
Earlier this year, the Human Rights
Campaign (HRC), the nation's largest gay rights advocate, posted four
of NOM's internal strategic memos from 2009. The memos caused an
uproar for stating that the “strategic goal of this project is to
drive a wedge between gays and blacks – two key Democratic
constituencies.”
In heavily African-American (29%)
Maryland, blacks played a major role in passing Question 6.
Forty-six percent of blacks voted for the measure, according to The
Washington Post.