Sep 21, 2007  | COMMENTS     

QUEEN OF DAYTIME talk Oprah Winfrey is omnipresent. Her monthly oracle — O, the Oprah Magazine — espouses the principles of self-help, self-love and self-giving. Her image floods newsstands. Bookstores stockpile their inventory with her choice for the book of the month. And presidential hopefuls genuflect before her to win votes.

Now for the first time, the media magnate is involved in politics. And Oprah threw a star-studded fundraiser for her presidential pick, Sen. Barack Obama. With 1,500 guests at her sold-out private soiree paying $2,300 apiece, Oprah’s endorsement of Obama just might help him buy the election.

But her “chosen one” is a candidate who would unquestionably deny gay Americans their full and equal civil rights, especially when it comes to same-sex marriage.

“I am somebody who has not embraced gay marriage. I’ve said that it’s not something that I think the society is necessarily ready for. And it strikes me that in a lot of ways for a lot of people, it may intrude in how they understand marriage,” Obama stated on CNN’s “Larry King Live” in late 2006.

But nearly a year later, and after being given much more information and education about the essential need to afford gay Americans their full and equal marriage rights, his position is unchanged.

And as the beneficiary of the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional in the case of Loving v. Virginia — a decision that allowed Obama’s parents to legally marry — he doesn’t see civil unions as reminiscent of this nation’s shameful era of “separate but equal.”

“As I proposed [civil unions], it wouldn’t be a lesser thing [than marriage] from my perspective,” Barack said during the much-ballyhooed HRC-Logo debate last month.

While it is true that none of the Democratic presidential frontrunners support same-sex marriage, Oprah must be asked: Would she endorse a presidential candidate who would give African Americans and women what Obama is proposing for gay Americans?

And as she tries to take America down an enlightened path in this presidential campaign, is Oprah’s endorsement of Obama more about being an instrument of racial equality in this country, by finally getting a black man elected to the highest office in this nation, than it is about the annoying and politically divisive issue of marriage equality? Is Oprah choosing, like many African-Americans ministers have done, which issue is more important for our black communities?

But is Oprah homophobic? Clearly she’s not a stranger to advocating for queer civil rights.

In the April 1997 coming-out episode of Ellen DeGeneres’ sitcom, Oprah played Ellen’s supportive therapist. And when Rosie O’Donnell on “The View” stated that Oprah and her longtime gal-pal Gayle were like a married lesbian couple, Oprah said to her magazine readers, “If we were gay, we would tell you.”

But would Oprah abandon her gay African-American brothers and sisters to elect a black man as president?

Unfortunately, civil rights struggles in this country have primarily been understood, reported on and advocated within the context of African-American struggles against racism. Consequently, civil rights struggles of women, gay people, Native Americans and other minorities in this country have been eclipsed, ignored and even trivialized at the expense of educating the American public about other forms of existing oppressions.

At the height of the second wave of the women’s movement in the 1970s, for example, women’s civil rights were pitted against African-American civil rights, often forcing African-American women to choose which was a greater oppression for them — being black or being female. And it was black women who had the most to lose from this forced dichotomy.

Today, a similar debate is brewing between African-American and gay communities.

With mostly African-American celebrities in attendance at Oprah’s Obama bash, Oprah is hoping for the black elite to put Obama in office. But that’s at the expense of not including the entire black community — its poor and gay members — let alone the rest of America.

Oprah talked to UPI about why she held the fundraiser at her home. “I call my home the Promised Land because I get to live Dr. King’s dream. I haven’t been actively engaged before because there hasn’t been anything to be actively engaged in. But I am engaged now to make Barack Obama the next president of the United States.”

Oprah has good intentions as she tries to lead America down the high road. However, that reminds me of the old adage, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”