Assembly Speaker Karen Bass said Wednesday that she is "appalled" at the hostility that has been directed at African-Americans since the passage of Proposition 8.

According to exit polls, 70 percent of black voters supported the gay marriage ban measure, which has caused friction between gays and blacks.

But during a meeting with The Bee's Capitol bureau, Bass said that lost in the post-mortems over Proposition 8 is that black support for the measure was "a generational issue" that divided younger and older African-Americans.

The Los Angeles Democrat, who is California's highest-ranking African-American elected official, said she was "really appalled at how quickly (the issue) was racialized, and it wasn't even analyzed."

"I have friends in Los Angeles, who are African-Americans in the (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community, and they went out to protest the vote and had racial epithets hurled at them," Bass said. "A couple of them were fearful and they left because they were threatened."

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