Edward Wyckoff Williams: Marriage Equality: How Blacks Paved the Way
Edward Wyckoff Williams is an author, a columnist, a political and economic analyst for MSNBC and NBC Universal, and a former investment banker. Follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.
The debate over same-sex marriage has proved a controversial topic among African Americans -- a conflict that reflects the myriad and contrasting opinions across the community. Because of an entrenched religious history and struggle for equality, blacks remain sensitive to the needs of those denied basic human rights but extremely conservative in applying a Christian-values litmus test to all moral subject matter.
Broad debates about the future of the nuclear family, and the crisis of fatherhood in the black community, have garnered attention from the pulpit to the dinner table. The debate over gay marriage has presented a unique stumbling block in which our values don't always mirror our aspirations, as well as a challenge to broaden our understanding of the words "family," "love" and "marriage."
African Americans are no strangers to having to redraw the lines. Statistics continue to show that blacks are the least likely of all ethnic groups to marry at all. For generations we have been raised by grandmothers or nurtured by aunts and uncles, and have found ourselves estranged from the mothers who bore us, the fathers we never knew, and sisters and brothers who all had different last names. In some respects, the civil rights movement gave birth to a new kind of freedom -- freedom to redefine the meaning of family and empower individuals, not governments, in the quest for love.
It seems only fitting to reference a quote from Mildred Loving, the iconic plaintiff in the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case of Loving v. Virginia, which made race-based marriage restrictions unconstitutional. Loving, a black woman who fought for the legal validation of her marriage to a white man, stated poignantly that marriage equality for gay couples is "what Loving, and loving, are all about."...