When playing the race card REALLY is stupid...and simply not right

I understand why—I think—Andrew Sullivan was disappointed when Californians voted for Proposition 8 (a simple act that iterates the obvious: the definition of marriage as a union between two people of the opposite gender).

But what I don't get is why he, even in his bitterness, would stoop to insult American people of color.

Every ethnic group supported marriage equality, [sic] except African-Americans, who voted overwhelmingly against extending to gay people the civil rights once denied them: a staggering 69 - 31 percent African-American margin against marriage equality. [My emphasis.]

Hello?????

By "marriage equality," I understand that Sullivan means same-sex "marriage." Got it. But what on earth is he talking about when he claims that black Americans voted against "civil rights once denied to them"?

I don't know where Mr. Sullivan lives, but where I live, nobody ever denied a homosexual man or woman the right to vote, the right to read, the right to use the same bathroom as Caucasians, the right to sit wherever he or she wanted to on a bus...the list goes on.

Jeff Jacoby nails it far better than I can.

I suggest Mr. Sullivan take a deep breath and apologize for his rather wretched racist comments.

And may I further suggest that people who keep insisting that a square is actually a circle quit trying to use black Americans to further their peculiar ideologies?