ABSTRACT
Scholars of American racial politics have routinely observed that blacks are much more likely than whites to favor liberal prescriptions for guaranteeing political equality and improving the economic status of the working class and poor (Dawson, 1994; Kinder and Sanders, 1996; Sigelman and Welch, 1991). However, the 2004 presidential election posed a crosscutting cleavage between black political and social attitudes. It confirmed that on certain moral issues a majority of African Americans are religious or social conservatives (Cohen, 1999; Dawson, 1994; Kinder and Sanders, 1996; R. C. Smith and Seltzer, 1992). With more than eighty percent of African Americans in the states of Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio, and Oklahoma voting for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, exit polls revealed that as many as eighty percent of blacks in those states also voted to have their state constitutions ban same-sex marriages. At center stage was a fundamental clash between the liberal civil rights proclivities of African Americans, which are in part shaped by the Black Christian church, and the religious opposition or at least discomfort these same churches have toward homosexuality and gay rights. The later stance dovetails with the social agenda of the Christian Right and the Republican Party. Not only did a number of black ministerial alliances and individual African American ministers-e.g., Walter Fauntroy, Jesse Jackson, Sr.—vocally object to same-sex marriage during this election season, a handful of black pastors, impressed by President George W. Bush’s Christian moralism, publicly endorsed the Republican candidate’s re-election (Abdo, 2004; Deggans, 2004; Kirkpatrick, 2004; Lattin, 2004).
