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How do you stop the hate in 2008? The recent passing of Proposition 8, a California State ballot aimed to take away the State’s ability to issue same-sex marriage licenses is raising questions on the […]
Fausto Fernós is the host of iTunes’ #1 LGBT talk show, the Feast of Fun podcast, which he produces and hosts with his partner, Marc Felion.
Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Fausto Fernós created the Feast of Fools in 1998 as wacky artists variety show in Chicago, Illinois. Feast of Fun grew out of an audio blog to promote the live show into the world’s most downloaded talk show aimed for gay people.
When he’s not blogging, recording or sleeping, Fausto can be found at the gym or appreciating the beauty found in nature.
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Comments
Love love LOVE Rev Straight!
Love the show today. Great insight and VERY topical subject matter. I agree with Fausto, why can’t all religious institutions be as open and honest as the Rev?
Great show! I could listen to Reverend Straight speak for hours. What an incredibly kind, thoughtful and insightful man! He makes me want to move to Chicago, become a Christian and start attending church!
I love Rev. Straight. He should become the next pope!
The Catholic church, under the German conservative, unworldly, ignorant pope is definitely not evolving but going backwards.
It would be easy to say that the information about the Black vote is a bunch of crap.
There WAS outreach:
Prop. 8 rivals seek support in black churches
Leslie Fulbright,Matthai Kuruvila, Chronicle Staff Writers
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
And sorry – the Black vote was 70% in favor of Prop. 8. Here’s a link to the official exit poll results:
http://media.sacbee.com/smedia/2008/11/05/18/prop8.source.prod_affiliate.4.pdf
Latinos weighed in just a bit towards Yes.
Asians weighed in just a bit towards No.
Though if you look at the statistics, it was really White Republicans and religious Christians who did the most damage.
Would Prop. 8 have been defeated if all of those Black votes were on our side?
I don’t think it really matters. It’s really the sentiment that hurts the most. We expected fundamentalists and Republicans to be against us, but not minorities.
This article echoes what we heard on the show:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/11/ED33141MLU.DTL
I find it odd that the Black community would blame the “White Gays” for not educating them when the Asian and Latino communities didn’t seem to have a problem figuring things out.
With Obama in the White House, it will be interesting to see if the Black community finally gets the picture that they can take their future in their own hands – just like the rest of us. There’s always “the man” trying to bring all of us down. But if we work together, it will be a whole lot easier to rise above it all.
I don’t mean this to sound like some sort of racist rant. I actually voted for Jesse Jackson in past elections. I guess it kind of comes down to – don’t put your shit on me and I won’t put my shit on you. And I mean that in the most productive way. Probably not expressed in the best way – but it’s a complicated issue which seems to have more to do with education, religion and poverty rather than color lines.
I was so happy you guys had Rev. Straight back on. The stuff you guys were talking about has been part of my conversations as of late and Rev. Straight brought some much needed clarity and understanding. Thank you and thank you Rev. Straight!
Good to hear the good reverend again! One small detail of your polling info was reported incorrectly Fausto-you stated the African American vote was 2-1 for Prop 8 here in CA. That part is true, but you then followed it up by stating that would be 50%. 2 to 1 would be 2/3 and the actual exit poll data was closer to 70% which is incredibly significant and as you pointed out revealed the failure of us white gays in CA to effectively reach that population.
That 70% stat has been credibly disputed by several sources, I can’t for the life of me find the darn links but one of them was NPR. They lay out a pretty convincing case. There seems to be no way that number could be correct based on exit polling. Maybe somebody can find the link.
of course as soon as I hit send I remember where to find it:
Another poll by the Center for the Study of L.A. found in Los Angeles, just over half of blacks supported Prop 8. Fernando Guerra directs the center at Loyola Marymount University. He told KPCC’s Larry Mantle that he doubts black opposition to the measure was as large as has been reported.
Fernando Guerra: Seventeen-and-a-half percent of all blacks in state of California live and vote in city of L.A. – so neither one of ours could be correct because for us to get only 52 percent – and statewide 70 percent, all blacks outside the city of Los Angeles would have had to support that proposition by 75 percent, so it makes it even higher.”
Guerra is a board member of Southern California Public Radio. His center conducted exit polls last Tuesday in L.A. neighborhoods with large numbers of black voters.
Thank you, Reverend Straight, for being a true blue ally of the queer community, and for coming back to the show. If Mr. Obama needs a new personal spiritual advisor, he should seriously consider you for the top job!
Another dose of insight and sense from the “Rocking Rev.”, good work guys.
What a wonderful man the Rev. Straight is. Thanks for mentioning the Lutherans. We Lutherans are negotiating?!? on the language for a “Social Statement on Sexuality”. It’s actualy pretty good with the exception of a few clauses that we are trying to get modified (We being Lutherans Concerned; the GLBT support organization in the ELCA). As Rev. Striaght would describe it, it is still a bit “conflicted”
Ask him back soon! Oh, and we (LC) can use all the good thoughts and prayers you can send our way.
I truly enjoyed this episode. Reverend Straight seems like a wonderful person with alot of good in his heart. When I heard the phrase, “social injustice,” it reminded of something though. Didn’t the catholic religion issue new “mortal sins” recently and wasn’t “Causing social injustice one of those? If that’s the case, it goes to show you how the catholic religion is messed up and how it contradicts itself all the time.
I am praying for all the world’s religions to stop pushing their beliefs down my throat. I agree with you Fausto, if all reverends were as wonderful as Charles, the world would be a great place.
I’d love to see him participate on the forums more often, see what he has to say.
I don’t blame African-Americans; I blame the No campaign. They didn’t make a persuasive argument in their ads. They allowed the Yes campaign to get away with all kinds of lies that were never countered in a convincing way. They allowed the Yes campaign to claim that gay marriage was a threat to religious freedom. The No ads said, very angrily, “That’s a lie,” but they didn’t explain why it was a lie. The language of the Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage specifically said that churches could not be forced to perform gay marriages. Did the No campaign ever explain this to the public? Absolutely not. The Yes campaign kept claiming that school children would be taught about gay marriage in schools. Did the No campaign ever explain clearly why this was not true. No. They claimed that it wasn’t true, but the Yes campaign came back right away with an ad showing San Francisco school children on the steps of City Hall watching a lesbian wedding. Of course, these children’s parents had organized this field trip, and no children were there without their parents’ permission. But the No campaign didn’t want to explain any of this. Apparently, they were trying to hide the fact that Prop 8 had anything to do with gay marriage at all, so they didn’t want to provide any of the specifics that would have refuted these specious arguments.
The No campaign kept saying that Prop 8 was unfair and wrong, but they never explained why it was unfair and wrong. They needed to tell the stories of gay couples who have been harmed by not being allowed to get married. But again, this would have required them to mention gay people, something that they seemed to reluctant to do.
Finally, the No campaign DID NOT make a serious outreach to African-Americans. There should have been ads directed at Black voters. They should have had ads featuring Black leaders explaining why Prop 8 was a threat to everyone’s civil rights. The NAACP opposed Prop 8, as did Barack Obama and MANY black leaders. Black voters should have been told this. The NAACP has gone to court to block Prop 8, claiming that it is a threat not only to the rights of gay people but to the rights of every minority. Why didn’t the NO campaign make this argument to African-American voters BEFORE the election? If this argument had been made clearly to Black voters before the election, we might have won a majority of Black votes and therefore have won the election.
Our side’s campaign sucked. That’s why we lost.
There was very little effort on the part of the No on 8 campaign to reach Black voters. The No campaign should have anticipated a higher Black turnout than usual, but they pretty much ceded the Black vote to the Yes campaign. The Yes campaign aggressively sought the Black vote. Almost all of the Yes ads featured people of color.
Fantastic show. I personally feel a bit vindicated as there was almost perfect alignment with what I have said on many threads and what the Rev. said on this show. There is responsibility on every side, all of us could have done more, no one gets off the hook. I was called a racist for saying the same things the Rev said here.
Tricky with all respect the LA info seems to me to be a massaging of the data in order to shift focus away from African American participation in the success of Prop 8 rather than an honest admission that STATEWIDE polling put the African American support of Prop 8 at 70%. To face and admit that doesn’t mean they were to “blame” singularly, as they were but one piece of the necessary support for the measure needed for it to pass. It’s just most notable for it’s irony and the crushing sense of disappointment felt by the huge number of LGBT folks who have always felt and acted on the feeling that all equality struggles have common ground, who have operated under the philosophy espoused by Dr King that essentially says that any oppression oppresses us all, and assumed that there would be common cause on this issue with African Americans.
I’m encouraged that I am seeing a move in energy away from the anger and frustrations of the initial days after the election, which was rightfully ours to own and express, and a move towards finding a way to constructively examine the data, learn from it and face the facts of the hard work we have to do in building bridges and selling common cause to a variety of communities including African American ones.
This was one fantastic episode. Thank you for having Rev. Straight on, uncensored. There’s so much I want to say, but I’ve already said it repeatedly on blogs and to friends for the past 2 weeks. I’ll just refer people to this episode from now on =)
Glad this episode resonated with so many people!
“face the facts of the hard work we have to do in building bridges and selling common cause to a variety of communities including African American ones.”
You say that as if the two communites are mutally exclusive. No gay isn’t the new black, gays have always been black, as well as every other color.
You’re right, we must face the facts, but we have to make sure that the facts are reported accurately in order to make the proper assesments. LA and Alameda are the two counties with the highest percentages of African American residents, neither show evidence of the 70 percent African American support of Prop 8.
The majority of the counties that heavily favored Prop 8 have insignificant African American populations. Votes are still being counted and the final vote total won’t be released until December 13th, at which time I’m sure many will go precinct by precinct in an effort to uncover the true percentage. However, based on what I’ve seen so far, it’s very likely the the African American vote was split with a slight majority in favor of 8, which would be consistent with several pre-election polls, such as The Field Poll and SurveryUSA poll.
It’s not about deflecting responsibility, it’s about accuracy. If we continue to state that 70 percent of African Americans supported Prop 8, when in fact it was actually 57 percent, you are turning supporters into opponents. Some may not see the harm in that, but I do.
Just a note, the only statewide polling done was the pre-election polling I mentioned above. The poll which states that 70 percent of African Americans supported Prop 8 was an EXIT poll done at a single precinct which consisted of less than 230 African Americans.