Alline Wright

 482 words

In the first article, "Race, Religion, and Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage," researchers studied to find an accurate explanation as to why African Americans are in more opposition to same-sex marriage than whites and other ethnicities. The General Social Surveys of 1998 and 2004-2008 were analyzed because they were shown to have the best results for a good length of time. Questions were asked about same-sex marriage support, religious factors, political beliefs, cohorts and sociodemographic variables to find the highest correlation to opposition of same-sex marriage. Although Whites and other ethnicities have had a gradual decline of opposition over the last 20 years, African Americans have had no substantial changes. Ordinal logistic regression models were used to compare demographic factors to religious commitments to try and see what contributes more to the racial gap. The most crucial factors that were found in this study that fill this gap are religious affiliation and religious participation.  Sectarian Protestant Christianity is the most dominant religion and part of African American culture and are very unlikely to liberalize their attitudes towards homosexual marriage. Factors like education level, income, residence location, gender and political values had no significant impact on African Americans' views of LGBT marital rights. With Whites, there is a positive correlation between educational attainment and homosexual marriage acceptance, but it does not liberalize Blacks in the same way. Views toward civil rights of free speech and employment were surveyed and African Americans were found to be just as accepting as Whites to extend these rights to homosexuals, but marital rights are when there is a strong decline in African American support. There is also a hostility present in the African American culture towards homosexuality because of a perceived White phenomenon and thereby goes against the Black identity.

            The second article, "Racial Differences in Age at First Sexual Intercourse: Residential Racial Segregation and the Black-White Disparity Among U.S. Adolescents," analyzed five dimensions of Black and White residential racial segregation to conclude what better defines the age disparity between Black and White first encounter of sexual intercourse between 12 and 20 years; Isolation, concentration, clustering, unevenness and centralization. All five were operationalized by using their various indexes that were all set to the same scale for easy comparison of how segregated Blacks and Whites were. All person-level data from 1997-2005 were used was from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 and crucial factors were shown to be regarding age at baseline, ethnicity, socioeconomic status (SES), family structure and whether they lived in a metropolitan area (MA). The U.S. Census 2000 data was used and the study was limited to only using data from MA's that had an African American population of more than 50% and unstable estimates were excluded. Black respondents were more likely than whites to have a low socioeconomic status and live in a single-parent home at baseline and the highly segregated MA's included had over 50 being highly concentrated and highly centralized. This means the disadvantages that African Americans face socially, economically and politically are concentrated to a higher extent and is characterized to urban areas of poverty and crowding. The most and least segregated MA's are more likely to have African Americans whom are sexually active at younger ages in adolescence than Whites. When neighborhoods are moderately integrated, the differences between sexuality in Blacks versus Whites nearly vanishes. This article analyzed how the level of residential segregation majorly impacted the racial disparity between the races' sexualities.