The stories I found most destructive about this week’s “snatching defeat from the laws of victory” news on marriage equality in the US state of Maryland, were the ones from black Democrats nakedly doing the bidding of church interests. Here’s Del. Cheryl Glenn, an African-American Democrat from Baltimore: “The black churches have never asked us for anything, and they are asking us now, ‘Don’t do this.’” Honestly, the way they just traded their votes in after a few phones calls gives a bad name to even the worst ‘special interests’ and lobbyists.

If I was an African American legislator, or a legislator worried about families in particular, it is not same sex marriage I would be worried about.  Try these other facts on for size about the disintegration of African American family structures … and notice how none of it is related to gays and lesbians.

The Pew Research Center’s November 2010 report on marriage and family found:
- In 1960, the black marriage rate was 61 percent. By 2008, only 32 percent of blacks married.
-72 percent of black women giving birth were unmarried
- 52 percent of black children were being raised in single-parent homes, 38 percent with two-parents/partners and fully 10 percent with no parents.

As Colbert King (the African American commentator) rightly points out in the Washington Post, you can also mention the “depressing data on the high rate of black teen pregnancies, the large number of black children ordered into foster care because of neglect and abuse, the absence of fathers or the disproportionate number of black men behind bars.”

I am not trying to pin the blame on family breakdown on anyone in particular – but I am sure not buying the line that our community is a threat to family. Sometimes it seems like we are the only people who want to build one!