Why would you think this conversation had been going on in any community outside of the already converted?

Are you actively involved in the feminist movement and talking to people about feminist issues? How about black issues or Asian issues? How about transgendered issues? Do you actively talk to the community you are involved in on those issues?

Most people aren’t involved in conversations outside of their immediate demographic. And I’m not pointing fingers and saying people are bad. I’m saying this is something we need to change. The corporate machine did a very good job at divide and conquering us after the 1960s. I think progressive and the little groups that make up progressive are farther apart than they have ever been.

People actively try to discredit and quiet people who want to mix issues.

To me in general I notice with most movements and this is something that in general really frustrates me. And the reason in general I’m just independent. I support everyone.

The movements are segregated. Feminism a movement that I support refuses to acknowledge the need to include all demographics of women: women of color, poor women, working class women, homeless women, lesbian women, transgendered women….

The movement for rights of undocumented immigrants have tried to involve other groups, but again this group has not been very effective in reaching out to working class community of all ethnicity a group of people who would really benefit from getting rid of legalized slavery. Legalized slavery brings down the standard of living of everyone, not just undocumented immigrants and the answer to this is not going to be stopping immigration the answer to this is making sure that everyone is treated the same. That’s a message that for some reason people seem to want to prevent from getting out there. It almost seems that corporate forces want these two groups to think that there is this competition and a victory for one group is a loss for another and that any victory based in oppressing people is a good thing. That’s always a negative in the longterm.

And with gay civil rights, there needs to be a coalition with groups of people.

Why are all of these movements segregated? Why aren’t they all the same movement.

And you know people like to point their finger at the No on 8 campaign. A campaign I’m assuming was run by mainly gay people, but you know what? Why do gay people have to fight this by themselves? This is a human right’s fight. Aren’t we all humans? Why weren’t other civil rights type organization involved in this BEFORE this didn’t pass. It’s not fair to get mad at No on 8 when all of the civil rights organization nowadays have been doing this paradigm of preaching to the converted and not building coalitions.

I remember when I went to the carwash protest at an organization and I got a real cold response from the Union folks that came down to Washington DC, because I didn’t match the demographic of who they were trying to go after and how dare I invite myself to that party. Now the carwash people who worked were totally happy to see a black woman there supporting them, but the people in charge, well they seemed a bit confused.

What’s the confusion for? Rights don’t get passed just by the work of the people who are oppressed or by college students.

I think the feminist movement would be a good compliment to the fight for same sex marriage since marriage between a man and a woman in the traditional sense was just a legal way for a man to own a woman and up until the 1970s in America it still was like that. Women couldn’t even buy a house or a car without having a piece of paper saying that a man owned her (she was married).

After same sex marriage is approved. I would like to get rid of state involvement in marriage completely.

The state should spend the money it wastes regulating marriage and use that to help homeless people or provide jobs for young people….

Browne

i guess all i’m tryin to say is i’ve known for a long time that conversations about gay rights with the elderly, less educated and lower income folks (amongst others) need to happen. my eyes must not have been open, but i thought the conversation had been going on with the black community already for some time. this was by far the strongest indication i’ve seen to the contrary. and for that reason, the exit poll was particularly jarring. the attention to that poll has clearly spiraled out of control, but i was happy for about half a second that someone other than me noticed it.

I think in general we need to ask what will the human community do to reconcile their differences. I think this gay community, black community thing in general are both communities that on one hand do exist, but on the other hand are manifested by the media in order to sell propaganda and hate. All groups based on biology are simply marketing tools to force people into a monolithic groupthink so that corporate American can easily sell to, denigrate, and exploit.

If everyone was an individual and that individuality was encouraged then it would be harder to make a commercial.

Neither group is monolithic.

My parents were pretty liberal, no, they were totally on the left batshit crazy BUT there was one good thing about my parents I didn’t realize there were “gay” people or “black” people or any kind of people, just human people, not until I moved to LA. Seriously it took me awhile to realize that the gay people that people were referring to on TV and in the teenage slang at the malls were the same people who were friends of my mother and father. I didn’t see any different in same sex or opposite sex relationships. I didn’t realize it was a term for it. And for some reason the term for it (even the non slang term, it was something in the way people described it, I guess similar to how some people whisper “black people”) in LA seemed to be negative, I don’t know why, but since my experience with gay people had never been negative I had no clue that this group that had this negative connotation were the same group of people that I knew.

I laugh at the fact now that when I was a kid my mom had a friend that had a same sex partner, they used to kiss all of the time, they were very into each other. It took me years to realize that was supposed to be different (in other people’s minds) than people of the opposite sex.

Now if people truly want people to get along they should probably start by doing what I’m doing, going to the root of the problem. Propaganda by corporate media that forces a wedge between people and distracts people from the true problem which is capitalism.

Capitalism is what drives hate.

Exploiting people is so much easier when they are fighting.

This hate for people who are gay, bisexual, black, asian, transgendered, white, biracial, poor, rich, homeless…there is a vested interest in keeping us distracted from the very rich who control everything and to have us fight for crumbs.

We have this idea that we can’t fight for everything at the same time. We think that a “win” for one group is a “loss” for another group and that is the problem. We let the rules of the game of capitalism creep into social justice issues.

So what are we going to do about that problem Human?

Of course that is a rhetorical question, but it starts with a discussion of the forces that control us.

A conversation that would just include black straight religious people and just gay white people isn’t going to do anything in the larger scale of things. Even if you got those groups together, well that’s two groups. Shouldn’t we work on building coalitions between everyone and then breaking down lines completely? I mean really, isn’t this the bases of our problem. People are divided into groups and those groups think that they don’t need to talk to other groups and they don’t need to build coalitions or that another group is competition. We need to stop this insanity and all of us need to be one group. One human group.

We need to start having conversations that doesn’t compartmentalize people and causes.

We need to have the Living Being Civil Rights Movement. Gay, straight, poor, working class, middle class, women, men, transgendered, bisexual, racial minorities, white, undocumented immigrants, the trees, the forest, the animal…we need to treat every living being with respect from the smallest blade of grass to the oldest poorest person.

Civil Rights needs to be all under the same banner. Gay rights, racial minority rights, undocumented immigrant rights and woman rights need to all be included on one single bill. Everyone gets their rights or no one gets their rights, so either all of the oppressed people will have to join together or we all lose. I’m willing to give that a shot Human, but I don’t know about the rest of the humans out there.

I have a little bit of faith, but not much.

Browne

let me start with myth 6. i completely agree with maat’s feather on this. it’s highly unlikely black voters had the turnout or voting behavior to swing prop 8. i will simply point out that the confidence intervals i reported are good for any black voter turnout between 500,000 and 1,500,000. you can play with the sample size calculator to verity this.

the reasoning on myth 1 is that precincts were selected at random. maat’s feather goes on to state how this reflects the black vote very poorly based on the distribution of black people by county. the problem is precincts are not counties. there are over 25000 precincts in the state, over 400 per county on average. after you do some arithmetic, you get that cnn polled about 22 precincts*. statistically and methodologically, this is pretty good. while it’d be nice for cnn to tell us exactly which precincts they used, if the selection was random, i would trust the exit poll.

enough about the statistical analysis of the cnn exit poll. let me answer the question of how i feel about the la times being racist. it sucks. i hate it. i wish journalism had more integrity.

a different question is of more importance to me. is the exit-poll right? sometimes the reflection of people we hold dear is ugly; and the sooner we admit that it’s ugly, the sooner we can try to fix it. i have yet to find any legitimate holes in how the results were compiled or their accuracy.

in the vein of rooting out ugly, of yet more importance than exit poll accuracy is what do the gay and black communities need to do to reconcile their differences? i’d much rather hear a conversation around that question.

* — 10mil voters/25000 precincts = 400 voters/precinct. about every fourth was exit-polled, so about 100 exit-poll participants per precinct. a total of 2240 participants / 100 participants per precinct is about 22 precincts.

http://www.angelenic.com/6135/proposition-8-protests-gain-steam-two-downtown-area-events-this-weekend

I have been involved in that one (as has Browne), and it has its share of haters, but they are mostly taken to task. I am also happy to see angelenic shedding their boosterist leanings. All it takes is for the blog owners to get politicized by having their rights stripped away (Rich, the blog master got married a few days before election day).

I was sadly not surprised then, to read all the hateful speech on that site (way worse than what’s on LAist) directed against Blacks (some still trying to find a way to disparage Latinos too.) It’s almost so ridiculous that it’s hard to believe it’s true. I would think most informed, educated people would be smart enough not to propagate the lame statistics about “70 percent of Blacks voted for Prop 8″ bullshit but there it is again on Metroblogging LA. Really, WTF?

Perhaps you can explain why you made this statement.

Might one infer that that this solitary article means the L.A. Times meant to mitigate the coming racialism that has recently bloomed like a bloody daffodil across its cretinous waste of paper, or that the L.A. Times meant only to state, “See? We care about black people” or, well. . . ?

In any case, please clarify. We know you are a published newspaperman; surely such a request is not out of line. (Just pretend I am a junior editor.)

One story doesn’t justify what the LA Times has done. Morehouse is in Georgia. What about some stories about black gays in LA and what they do? To me that Morehouse story is akin to people giving money to Africa, but letting poor people right here in South Central starve.

And it’s not just with this issue, but their seemingly vested issue in flaming the black vs brown thing. Their non equal representation of Latinos in comparison to the population in just random man/woman on the street stories.

And the black vs gay thing. How it’s being covered is ridiculous.

The LA Times to me, it seems racist and homophobic and classist and anti-immigrant. It is a disgrace that in a city as diverse as LA that’s what we have as a paper. I want to like the LA Times, but it’s so much crap in there.

Their stupid racist and sexist blogs.

The Homicide Report that is totally pointless with now that Jill is gone.

With the amount of gay people in LA there should be a story in there daily about gay people, not just when it suits someone’s messed up political agenda.

And the writers don’t know LA. They are all from somewhere else and only get their stories from things that they find online. And from their friends that helped them move. They don’t have any beat reporters that find stuff anymore.

80% of the local people that they quote I have met, so either I have a wide range of associates or the LA Times circle of contacts is very small. If you have a staff job at the LA Times you’d think you would write a story with a bit more effort than pulling up your email list and asking your friend, “do you know any gay people.”

At the rallies according to Bert the focus in the Mormons. I see very little of that on the LA Times, one story in comparison to the five or six with posts on the black angle. Most gay people aren’t thinking on that level and are being very open-minded about this whole matter, but are any of them quoted are asked anything heck no, because that doesn’t go with Zell’s divide and conquer objective.

And lots of their stories it looked like people just asked their friend. And when your circle of friends come from the same class and practically the same race your stories become pretty nondiverse and when you are a paper of record that means you are participating in institutional discrimination, because you are purposely excluding people and their views because you don’t care. I know they know. I’ve written them.

I mean the LA Times quoted a non-black, black gay organization to give a feeling about black gay people. Why?

I’m not gay and I would know where to go. I would probably start out by not thinking that a “black” organization based in West Hollywood is a black organization. I would then leave my house and go south of the ten freeway. And I’d probably stay there more than five minutes, maybe I would stay there an hour and go back the next day and ask more than the one person that would give me the quote I want to finish the story I already wrote with my preconceived biases a question. Why not ask Carl Bean. He is an openly gay black man who started a church Unity Church that was open to all people black, gay, etc…I mean why can’t they even do more than google to get some info on black people and gay people and any people for that matter.

They don’t represent anyone fairly but American born, straight, college educated, middle class, westsiders (silver lake included), that’s it. That is the only group of people that gets a fair representation from the LA Times and that is not fair. If it’s painting itself as a national paper.

If it wants to rename it the moderate-right, yuppie paper and what yuppies think of the rest of y’all then ok then I could be more understanding, but right now I’m not getting it.

Browne