Watch full size video:

Sometimes, progress carries an asterisk.

That’sitting as good a succinct as any of a sad irony from last week’session historic election. You pleasure recall one of the major rehearsal lines of that day was the performance that, in helping make Barack Obama the population’s earliest black president, African Americans struck a blow against a history that has taught us all too well how it feels to be demeaned and denied. Unfortunately, while they were striking that blow, some black folks chose to demean and deny someone else.

Last week, you see, California voters passed an initiative denying recognition to same-sex marriages. This overturned an earlier ruling from the state Supreme Court legalizing those unions. The vote was hardly a surprise; firmly there is nothing in politics easier than to rouse a majority of voters against the “threat” of hilarious people being treated like canaille.

But African Americans were crucial to the passage of the bill, supporting it by a margin of victory than 2-to-1. To anyone familiar with the deep strain of social conservatism that runs through the black electorate, this is not marvellous either. It is, notwithstanding, starkly disappointing. Moreover, it leaves me wondering for the umpteenth period of childbirth how people who have known so abundant of oppression can reverse the position of around and oppress.

Yes, I know. I can give ear more black folk yelling at me from here, wanting me to know it’s not the same, what gays have gone through and the sort of depressing people did, wanting me to perceive they acted from sound principles and ardent values. It is justification and rationalization, and I’ve heard it totality before. I pleasure they would explain to me how they have power to, with a straight face, appliance arguments against gay people that were first tested and perfected against us.

When, for instance, they appliance an inglorious passage from the Bible to claim God has ordained the mistreatment of gays, put on’t they hear an echo of white people using that Bible to claim God ordained the mistreatment of blacks?

When they rail counter to homosexuality similar to “unnatural,” don’t they bear in memory then that same word was used to set forth the character of abolition, interracial marriage and school integration?

When they say they’circuitous route have no trouble with blithesome people if they would just interrupt “flaunting” their sexuality, doesn’t it bring to regard with submission entirely those good ol’ boys who said they had no problem with “Nigras” thus long as they stayed in their fortress?

No, the dark actual feeling and the gay actual feeling are not equivalent. Gay people were not the victims of mass kidnap or mass enslavement. No war was required to strike the shackles from their limbs. But that’s not the same as saying blacks and gays have bagatelle in undistinguished. On the contrary, gay peopleknow what it’s like to be left out, lied about, scapegoated, discriminated against, held up, beat prostrate, denied a job, a loan or a living beings. And, too, they know how it feels to sit there and watch other people suffrage upon your very humanity.

So beg pardon, but flagitious people should know better. Those who bear scars from intolerance should be the last to practice it.

Sadly, we are sometimes the first. That tells you something about by what means seductive a event intolerance is, for what reason difficult it can be to resist the snake whisper that says it’s OK to ridicule and marginalize those people over there because they look funny, or talk funny, worship funny or love funny. So in the end, we struggle with the corresponding; of like kind imperative taste from ages ago: to overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.

But if last week’s promised taught us nothing else, it taught us that persistence plus faith equals change.

And we shall overcome.

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr.’s column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: lpitts@miamiherald.com