It’s been an interesting couple of weeks since Proposition 8 passed in California.
It can be debated, of course, whether its passage was primarily a result of money, lies, fear, and politicking or the genuine intention of more than half of California’s voters to express an opinion about who’s deserving of basic civil rights. Either way, it hit me hard.
I actually called in sick November 5—a mixture of bad allergies, a sore back from being out in the cold the night before at a polling place, staying up late to watch the returns, and the sick realization that my state had just passed a law restricting my rights and pursuit of happiness.
Not to compare the passage of Proposition 8 to the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11, but I had some of the same emotions November 5, 2008, as I had September 12, 2001. Not the shock, per se—it’s not a big surprise to me that a minority should have a hard time making a case for itself in the face of a massive effort to scare, threaten, and manipulate voters—but definitely the anger, sadness, disappointment, and general concern about what might be coming next.
A few days after the election, I watched The Laramie Project, the film by Moisés Kaufman about the small town of Laramie, Wyoming, and its townspeople’s response to the 1998 beating and murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard. I’d seen the film before, but, while watching it this time, I noticed my hackles were up, more than usual, as though a similar crime had happened very near to me and very recently.
Proposition 8 was one big hate crime. That’s how it felt to me. And it was perpetrated not just by a few errant and mean-spirited religious organizations, but also by our neighbors, colleagues, family members, and so-called friends.
So, I still feel sad, angry, and disappointed. I still feel some amount of worry. After all, the Yes on 8 folks got away with this. What might they manage next if this kind of state-sanctioned discrimination is allowed to stand? But the outcry from right-thinking people—people who get it—has been really moving, and I’ve had countless reasons to smile in these past two weeks, also. For my first blog posting for Equality Action Now, I thought I’d recap some of the things that have kept me motivated and hopeful and given me some amount of comfort since Election Day (presented in no particular order, by the way). It’s a long list, which is a good thing, I suppose. I promise shorter blog posts in the future. Keep fighting the good fight.
1. Positive Election Day experiences: OK, these were actually the day of the election, before all the returns were in, but they’re still helpful to me in mitigating the impact of the vote.
I was one of about 7,500 Election Day volunteers for the No on Prop. 8 effort (an uplifting thing in and of itself, I should say), and the conversations I had during and after my four-hour shift made a lasting impression on me.
I went with two other volunteers to a polling place in Land Park. The idea was to stand beyond the 100-foot line, pass out cards with information about Proposition 8, and encourage those who already opposed the proposition to make it past the presidential candidates all the way to the end of the ballot. After a frustrating experience early in the evening—a resident of the neighborhood stormed out of his house shouting at us, took our signs and tried to tear them up, threatened to blind my eyes (whatever that means), called the police on us, and continued to shout and glare from his front yard until they showed up—we had a series of great encounters with people we’d never met before.
The police—four cars were sent out—retrieved and returned our signs. They made sure we knew we were in the right as far as the law went and gave us their contact information in case we felt further threatened or harassed. Then a pollworker sent out fresh and very yummy chocolate chip cookies, which greatly improved standing around in the cold and dark. We had supportive and sometimes lovely conversations with the vast majority of voters who stopped to talk to us. A car drove by, and the passengers shouted out, “No on Prop. 8! Represent!”
And, most importantly, a voter who’d passed by earlier with his wife and son went home after voting, changed his clothes, and rode back on his bike to stand with us. He held a No on Prop. 8 sign for the next hour-and-a-half, and we all shared our thoughts about election issues, our families and backgrounds, our careers, and so on.
After my shift, I went to the Fox & Goose to watch the returns with some friends. After it seemed clear Proposition 8 might pass, or at least that it would be down to the wire, I had another bunch of interesting conversations with total strangers who were vowing to get involved in whatever could be done to invalidate it. I came home on Election Night crushed but sensing that a real movement might be starting. And it was.
2. Signs of a cooler White House: Though it felt like too little too late when he said it, President-elect Barack Obama included the word “gay” in his Election Night acceptance speech. As author Marc Acito wrote for NPR, “After the rhetoric of the last eight years, that was certainly a change we needed.” Obama also plans to end discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity; expand hate crime statutes, including by passing the Matthew Shepard Act; and end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (a major factor, by the way, in my own decision not to reenlist after my five-years as a Navy journalist were up).
3. Efforts to change the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ tax status: As has been widely reported, the church was one of the largest proponents of the amendment that took my rights away. Its members made phone calls, walked precincts, produced ads, and donated millions of dollars toward the campaign. It’s unclear whether anyone can prove the church violated the law in promoting Proposition 8, but given the weight of the church on this issue, I’m all for investigating and sorting out how to keep church and state separate in the future.
4. Sportscaster, news anchor, and political commentator Keith Olbermann’s special comment for MSNBC: Olbermann’s six minutes or so on the topic of Proposition 8 were touching, reasoned, and passionate. They also reached millions of TV viewers nationwide, not to mention several hundred thousand on YouTube.
5. Local and state elected officials’ support: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger expressed sympathy for the gay and lesbian community after the election and urged us to fight back. A few dozen California legislators (one third of the California Legislature) signed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the California Supreme Court to invalidate Proposition 8. And legislators and mayors, including those of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, and West Sacramento, have participated in countless protests, vigils, and rallies since the vote.
6. Local activists’ tirelessness! My neighbors haven’t taken down their No on Prop. 8 signs yet, and neither have I. The turnout at Sacramento’s major rallies has been amazing. And there are other kinds of events breaking it all up and keeping up the momentum: among them, the National Day Without Gay, independent/personal boycotts of the local folks who funded the proposition, blue lights in windows and on porches for support, and Sacramento’s silent all-night march. (Can I just say I love the idea of 100 silent marchers walking through Midtown late at night? And stopping to use the bathroom at Safeway, no less.) My friends are constantly sending me stuff by MySpace, Facebook, e-mail, and phone. Folks are dedicated. Committed. As event organizer Jade Baranski told News10, “We’re not going to go anywhere. … We’re your neighbors, we’re your sisters, we work for you, and we’re here and we want our rights back.”
7. Local media are paying attention: Fox40, KOVR, The Sacramento Bee, the Sacramento News & Review, Capital Public Radio, and other local media are covering it all: events, the legislative battle ahead, and whatever related issues come up. They’ve got video from rallies, photo albums, and archives of news coverage. Just one bit of advice: Don’t read the comments from readers unless you feel like a good cry or a nasty fight. Can there really be so many hateful and ignorant people? (Really, anyone who doesn’t understand parallels to the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, might want to take a look. A lot of these people sound an awful lot like the racists of a half-century ago. One comment I read the other day was from a California voter who voted no on Proposition 8 but said she’d vote yes today based on the LGBT community’s response to its passage. In other words, she didn’t mind us too much until we started speaking up for ourselves.)
8. The whole world is watching! And participating! Proposition 8 is generating news coverage and debate in national and international media. Friends in foreign countries are sending e-mails of support and encouragement. And last weekend, rallies were scheduled for close to 300 American cities. We are not alone.
9. Petitions! OK, we don’t typically overturn election results through petitions, except maybe to get another initiative on the ballot when it’s time to do so, but it’s encouraging that almost 300,000 people have signed Courage Campaign’s petition and similar ones in only two weeks. (Courage Campaign, by the way, also presented petitions to the Mormon Church in advance of the election, which the church rejected. The video on that is worth the watch.)
10. Blogs! Bloggers—Angry Black Bitch, Your Daily Lesbian Moment, Advocate bloggers, The Huffington Post, Kel Munger for SN&R’s Snog, Broadsheet, and many others—have been all over this, offering humorous headlines and insights.
11. Creative fund-raising efforts, like the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center’s “Invalidate Prop. 8,” through which you can make a “tax-deductable donation, in the name of the president of the Mormon church, to support the legal organizations working to invalidate Proposition 8 and to fund grass-roots activities in support of full marriage equality.” With the click of a few buttons, you can donate money and have a postcard sent to the church’s president, thanking him for his support. “Invalidate Prop. 8” has raised more than $60,000 so far.
12. Thought-provoking reality checks and different perspectives on communicating with voters: Not that the basic rights of a minority group should be up to popular vote in the first place, but in case our next step is another ballot initiative—hell, even if it isn’t—we’re going to need to improve how we reach out to those outside our usual pride parades and social circles.
Institutionalized heterosexism is a fact: marriage and adoption laws, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” workplace discrimination, and so on. This is a society that highly values marriage. It’s a civil-rights issue. No two ways about it. Still, the phrases “civil rights” and “separate but equal” and the invocation of Loving v. Virginia connote different things to different people, and we could have been more thoughtful about how we used them during the election season. The phrase “Jim Crow” is being used rather freely on protest signs now, too, and that isn’t necessarily helping our cause with African-Americans.
As writer Jasmyne Cannick has argued, No on 8 activists weren’t going door to door in black neighborhoods in the same way the Yes on 8 folks were, weren’t thinking about some of the big challenges facing other minority groups, and weren’t as thoughtful as they could have been about the ways they communicated about the proposition. Bloggers have chimed in on this point, too.
And after the election, many in our community took the media’s word for it that African-American turnout was a primary factor in Proposition 8 passing (exit poll here) and let that create unneeded division and hostility.
Also on this point, sort of, a quick look at the Yes on 8 web site shows that its campaign materials were translated into 10 or more languages. I don’t believe No on 8 efforts were quite so multilingual. Lesbians and gays exist in all cultures. They are all our communities, and we need to do more to reach out to them generally.
And even though we should continue to push the point that this shouldn’t be about religion in the first place, we need to avoid condemning all people of faith, reach out to religious communities, and get liberal churches to be more vocal on our behalf.
We need to have conversations, and we need to say what should be obvious. Yes on 8 materials talked about “indoctrination of schoolchildren,” and we weren’t able to convince voters that (a) schoolchildren would not in fact be indoctrinated by anyone; (b) letting adolescents in on the fact that gay couples exist shouldn’t be a problem in the first place; and (c) passing Proposition 8 inherently teaches children that it’s OK to discriminate by popular vote and constitutional amendment. That’s just an example. We could have done a better job of nullifying the proponents’ arguments about morality, sin, legal bugaboos, and all sorts of other stuff.
13. More and more people coming out! For example, Wanda Sykes, at a rally in Nevada on November 15. She’d been vocal in the past about Proposition 8 and had included gay marriage in her standup, but the election moved her to talk about her own relationship and to work harder for equality nationwide.
14. Lots of support from straight folks, like my ex-husband, who’s been helping with this blog, running sound at rallies, holding candles at vigils, working on the Equality Action Now web site, and just generally being a great person.
15. Protest signs and buttons: My favorite buttons so far are these ones, which were being passed out at a rally at the Capitol on November 9 and show the number of years couples have been in their relationships. There’s even one that says <1, which is appropriate for me. It’s all about having some pride in ourselves and our relationships. For some recent shots of Sacramento protest signs, just do a search on Flickr.
16: There were only going to be 15, but today the California Supreme Court accepted three lawsuits to invalidate the proposition. Oral arguments could come as early as March.
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