Subscribe to Breaking NewsVanasco: Do protests matter?
The modern gay movement started with a protest 40 years ago. Stonewall showed us that being gay didn’t make us weaker – it just made us different.
Since then, we have made an art of the protest. We carried Silence = Death signs during the AIDS crisis. We ate fire with the Lesbian Avengers. We stormed the country because we were furious about the passage of Prop 8. And we kissed our partners in Salt Lake City and around the country to protest the Mormon handling of gay PDA.
Today, the Freakonomics blog at the NY Times has a circle of experts pontificating on whether protests work.
Their answer?
It depends.
Chester Crocker, professor at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service says that protests matter, but they might wind up having a negative affect. They can undermine governments, apply pressure on policymakers, and get media attention.
Crocker says that some of the most effective protests happen in democracies that already recognize civil rights and political liberties and when they’re “led by skillful political activists and organizers who understand how to manipulate public opinion and targeted at concrete rather than abstract ideological goals.”
On the other hand, street power, he says, can get out of hand and subvert the democratic process.
Political Science professor David S. Meyer adds:
“A protest is a signal about who you are, what you want, and what else you might do. . . . Demonstrators can stiffen the spine of would-be allies in government, suggesting there might be advantages in pressing for new positions on climate change, abortion, or gay marriage. No savvy politician will admit to changing direction in response to demonstrations in the street, but of course, it happens all the time.
When activists make progress, it’s always less than what they want. . . . People don’t generally take to the streets looking for smaller reforms, but often it’s only by asking for more that they get anything.”
What none of the experts say is what we implicitly know: protests help make a movement out of outrage; they get people involved in the political process; they show people that their voice, their anger, can make a difference. They are outlets for creativity. They educate. They help make a community out of a group of people who may have nothing but their race, gender or sexual orientation in common.
Protests help change policy and change minds, yes; but they also teach the protesters how to organize, how to lobby, how to get media attention. In short, they help create a class of people to lift the whole group up.
So whether or not protests seem to work right away; whether or not the protest itself seems misguided; we need to keep protesting until all our rights are won.
“You must not desist from protesting because you don’t see an immediate result,” said Howard Zinn, professor emeritus at Boston University. “What immediately looks like a failure may turn out to be a success.”
Lonnie, not sure what planet you’ve been on the last 6 or 7 years but in Mass we protected marriage equality after a legal battle by LOBBYING. We had few protests..except on voting days at the state house, which makes good news but doesn’t change votes.
Votes CHANGED due to intense lobbying from many angles…directly at the state house, private meetings and phone calls with legislators and lots of meetings with neighbors in the communities so that they could become supportive LOBBYISTS.
We struck down the mean spirited potential vote in mass by lobbying our elected reps and their constituents. Protesting was not how we won.
We should do both, of course, but to say lobbying doesn’t work shows you haven’t been watching our successes very closely.
As far as the overall success of lobbying the last 35 years, you again skip history. We have had a ton of success…I’m married!
We have a long way to go but the lobbying we’ve done these years sure has been effective….even if you overlook your gross error in saying we were not protesting those years either.
We need to keep-going on protests and boycotts to send a message to bigots!!!
The job of “100 percent equality” is FAR FROM OVER!!!
And also, in most cases people who see gay marriage as a “threat to marriage” – are the very same individuals as lying bigots with their own marriage problems!!!!!!
If your passion is to protest, then protest! If your passion is phoning political protests, then get telephoning! If your passion is writing letters, then get your pens and computers busy!
DO NOT BE SILENT! SPEAK OUT! ACT OUT!
Remember our opponents get results by speaking and acting out. Let the voices of hundreds of thousands of us be heard in the halls of political, religious and economic power!
Historically, protests that are well-organized and well-attended have had a major impact. Ask the African-American community.
We need to show Washington that we are here, we are queer, we are millions and we are tired of waiting.
Nothing says that better than our faces and bodies on the line en-masse!
I strongly support, and hope to attend, the March on Washington in October.
Of course they do. Imagine where we would be without them.
http://stuffqueerpeopleneedtoknow.wordpress.com/2009/08/20/national-equality-march-oct-10-11/
There should be absolutely no doubt that protests do in fact matter and work. It is clear that lgbt rights were and are not a top priority for the Obama administration. But the massive protests of last Nov 15 and the several local and national protets have in fact forced response, however tepid, from both Obama and Bill Clinton. Obama himself issued a proclamation declaring June LGBT Pride Month and commemorating (ie, recognizing the usefulness and praising) the fact that protesting against lgbt inequality worked then and can work now. We need to also be clear that Iowa legalized marriage equality in direct response to the massive protests which erupted against Prop 8.
The truth is we’ve NOT seen real protests at all in the last 35 years or so. We have an entire generation of young activists for whom protest means 10 people with signs instead of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people surrounding a legislative building or occupying a commerce center.
I think those who dismiss the power and effectiveness of protest are really just vocalizing their own pessimism and projecting it onto the movement. No sane person can doubt how the size, scale, and targets of the protests for lgbt equality which have occurred just over the last 9 months has had a PROFOUND effect on the confidence and creativity of supporters of equal rights. To underestimate or deny this momentum is dangerous to the movement.
And we also need to be honest. Most of the people who ask “Do protests matter?” Don’t go to protests anyway. They’re preferred method is either complete passivity (and taking pot shots from the sidelines) or lobbying. If any method of social change should be argued as ineffective and a waste of time, that method is lobbying. After all, lobbying has been the dominant strategy of the lgbt rights movement for the last 35 years and yet lgbt people still remain an unprotected class under the Constitution 35 years later. Protest forced the American Psychological Association to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) in about a year.