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.

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!!!!!!

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!

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.

http://stuffqueerpeopleneedtoknow.wordpress.com/2009/08/20/national-equality-march-oct-10-11/

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.