I didn’t intend to write a comment that amounts to an essay, which I generally tend to find excessive and even abusive. But I’ve been reading these comments for days on the discussion of race in the Prop 8 vote, and I think there’s a political perspective here that could be dangerous for all U.S. gays and racial/ethnic minorities to miss.

A cornerstone of the strategy to build Republican dominance in the last half-century started with Nixon’s Southern Strategy and (for the time being) ended with Karl Rove’s efforts to restructure the American electorate. A key element of Rove’s strategy was to build alliances between black and white evangelical churches and their congregations, forging unlikely alliances on the basis of fundamentalist religious ideology. Rove smiled and hoped that blacks would forget that white evangelical churches had worked hard to deny blacks their civil rights for a century in the South (to the extent that the Southern Baptist Convention issued a public apology to blacks on June 20, 1995 for bigotry and discrimination).

Some of the discourse that started in the black church on gay marriage was, in part, aided (and perhaps installed) by white evangelicals with the larger political purpose of peeling blacks away from the Democratic party. This isn’t to let black religious leaders off the hook for buying into bigotry. But they had a lot of cynical help from white Republicans eager to stoke black religious anxiety for their own ends.

For a Republican party in disarray, efforts to regroup and, yes, to divide and conquer Democrats (like they’ve done before) are today’s singular focus. Don’t think they wouldn’t love to recast the Prop 8 vote as blacks against gays. In fact, I’m sure they would find the whole gay/black Prop 8 discussion absolutely delicious.

To be clear: this is “Christian” conservatives hard at work. Libertarian-style Republicans have very little in common with this ilk. In fact, Christian conservatives, in their efforts to fracture the Democratic party and the larger American electorate, effectively fractured their own Republican party as evidenced in the last two election cycles. Prominent Christian conservatives like Marilyn Musgrave were booted from office, and the Republican party has been spectacularly reduced once again to the minority party for the conceivable future. They’ve even managed to fracture religious communities; millions of Christians support gay marriage or, at the very least, are horrified by some of the hatred spewing from some evangelicals. Karma strikes. But don’t think the Christian conservatives aren’t hatching ways to return to dominance not only within the Republican party but in American politics as a whole. They are already framing the Prop 8 vote as proof that evangelical principles are still guiding forces in shaping politics – and in highlighting differences between communities.

I understand the crushing hurt that the Prop 8 vote has leveled on the California (and, indeed, the national) gay community. For most of my life, I lived in the South where in most places, gays can still be fired from jobs and kicked out of housing purely on the basis of sexual orientation. While Californian gays were stripped of their civil right of marriage (but still retain something akin to civil unions – cold comfort), Arkansan gays in the same election were stripped of the right to be foster or adoptive parents. This isn’t to dismiss the hurt that Californian gays feel over being deprived of what is a fundamental right, but rather to say that gays everywhere understand your pain through the prism of being denied even more basic rights like being able to adopt children or hold down a job. By the way, a majority of blacks in Arkansas voted AGAINST the proposition there to deny gays (and all unmarried couples) the right to be foster or adoptive parents. This vastly complicates any argument that pits blacks against gays in the gay civil rights movement, as does support for gay marriage by many prominent black politicians and religious figures.

When your basic rights are taken away, it’s tempting to single out hypocrisy in one group or another. It hurts that a majority of black voters in California voted to strip away our rights to be families at the very moment a plurality of Americans elected the nation’s first black president in our 221 year history, and focusing on that irony might feel like an attractive salve for our wounds. When you discover that ANYONE is ELIGIBLE to discriminate, it’s easy to turn to righteous indignation.

Please, don’t give in to that temptation. It will bring us all down, and it misses the larger picture.

The larger picture is that there will always be bigotry in oppressed groups. White gays have discriminated against blacks, blacks against Latinos, Latinos against Asians. The larger picture is whether we decide to heal those divides, or allow them to reduce us to nervously scrambling for the crumbs left at the table for us by oppressive majorities (like Christian conservatives).

The larger picture is that gays need blacks, just as blacks need gays. And, if you’re black AND gay, you need both of us, and we certainly need you. In the ongoing civil rights struggles (with an “s”) we cannot afford to abandon any community that might be reeling from the same overall bigotry that has hurt us.

The larger picture Is that things are going our way. A majority of Americans support some sort of legal recognition for gay couples giving us ALL the rights of marriage, whether or not they support it being called “marriage.” And this isn’t just nationally. In my travels throughout Africa and South America, I see attitudes changing there as well. A lot of this is an artifact of demographics: anti-gay forces are, quite literally, aging out, and the younger generation finds it less and less tenable to deny rights to people on the basis of sexual orientation. But attitudes are changing among all age groups.

The larger picture is that whether we get civil rights through court, legislation, or even popular referendum, we are getting them. But regardless of whether we go to court or congress, we have to continue changing hearts and minds. Telliing our stories has proven to be the most effective way to do this. There’s no denying it: the more visible we’ve become over the years, the more public sentiment has gone our way. Sure, a slim majority of Americans are against gay marriage, but only a sliver of the American electorate now supports firing someone or kicking them out of their home simply for being gay. And public opinion in Massachusetts and Connecticut supports keeping gay marriage there. Twenty years ago, I would have never thought that possible.

So rather than sniping at each other in a manufactured argument over whether blacks cost gays the right to marry in California, start inviting your black (and white, and Asian, and Latino, and even conservative Christian) neighbors over for dinner, or to your children’s birthday parties. Work with them in causes you mutually support, like alleviating poverty, improving health care or increasing educational opportunities. The pundits talk about “ground games” in politics, and whether we like it or not, our personal stories are simply the biggest ground game out there. And, don’t forget, we’ve lived long enough to see the nation’s first black president, and gay marriage legal in two states (MA & CT — and civil unions in three, NJ, NH & VT). Whether it’s in our living room or at the ballot box, over time we’ll see more and more of our neighbors standing with us rather than against us.