Dan Savage Said What?!

picture via http://sfist.com/attachments/SFist_Brock/prop%208%20hot%20guy.jpg

If anyone's been following the blogosphere, you've probably seen something about this. To summarize, Dan Savage, one of my all time favourite bloggers, did a post titled Black Homophobia. He then goes on to say that recent polling showed that 70% of African Americans voted for Prop 8, which is far more of a margin than any other ethnicity noted in polls. Savage then wrote than the gay community, by and large, consistently support African American rights, while not recieving support in return. To quote Savage, "Finally, I’m searching for some exit poll data from California. I’ll eat my shorts if gay and lesbian voters went for McCain at anything approaching the rate that black voters went for Prop 8."

Now, personally, I don't feel like he said anything racist here. It seems to me that what he said means that African Americans should still have equal rights, and its not as though he's removing his support of them, he just thinks this should be a two-way street. The main problem with what he's saying here comes from that quote. When people, including the gay community, voted for Barack Obama, they were not voting for African American rights, and most usually they were not even voting for an African American! We voted for the man because we wanted him to be president, not his race.

This whole thing brings me back to the first Palin SNL skit. The one where Amy Poehler as Hillary Clinton delivered the line, "No! When I was running for president, I didn't want a woman to be president, I wanted to be president!"

It is absolutely amazing and fantastic that we have elected our first African American president, but I think we need to remember what seemed so prevelant during the election process: we did not elect him or choose not to vote for him based on the colour of his skin.