"I view everyone - no matter their color or orientation bigoted if they vote to take away rights from anyone... "
This is a common saying here on DU, but it is not an accurate discription of bigotry, because the vote itself tells nothing about the mindset of the individual voters.
First, this is what bigotry is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigotry A bigot is a person who is intolerant of opinions, lifestyles or identities differing from his or her own, and bigotry is the corresponding attitude or mindset. Bigot is often used as a pejorative term to describe a person who is obstinately devoted to prejudices, especially when these views are either challenged, or proven to be false or not universally applicable or acceptable.
The problem is this: To know if any single voter is bigoted, you must know the beliefs of each voter in regards to other groups. The vote alone does not reveal that, and to call someone bigoted without knowing that is a form of prejudice in and of itself. The word "prejudice" literally means to pre-judge.
There could be different reasons for black voters to vote in favor of Prop 8, which I stated multiple times over in the threads in the other forum. One reason is a socially conservative attitude about marriage, as many African-Americans are socially conservative. Another could be that they didn't know or realize that they were taking away rights from others, as the argument had never been made to them, due to little contact between the gay communities and the black communities. I think there is little interaction between the two communities, by and large, and there is a lot of cultural myopia on both sides. Some voters may have thought that they were voting in favor of their traditional concept of marriage of being one man and one woman, a concept that has been around many hundreds of years. This is compared to the relatively new phenomenon of same sex marriage, which the black voters probably haven't even thought about much yet because they've had little reason to, unless they are gay.
And some voters may simply be bigots. Whatever their reasons, without knowing those reasons one can not call them bigoted as a group without exhibiting bigotry oneself, in my opinion, as their motivations and beliefs cannot be ASSUMED. You have to ask them to find out why they voted the way they voted, and no one has done that, as far as I can tell. The mad angry rush to judge these voters was quite frightening and revealing, unfortunately.
