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Loading ...Prop 8: What went wrong
GLBT Americans awoke Nov. 5 to the news they had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
While right-wing candidates and causes were largely voted down at ballot boxes the day before, state proposals to constitutionally ban same-sex marriage in California, Florida and Arizona nonetheless prevailed, as did a law prohibiting gays and lesbians from adopting or serving as foster parents in Arkansas.
Of those defeats, none stung worse than Proposition 8.
Approved by 52 percent of California voters, Proposition 8 overrode a May ruling by the state’s supreme court legalizing same-sex marriage. In addition to banning gay and lesbian couples in the state from future marriages, the ballot initiative left about18,000 existing same-sex California marriages in legal limbo.
What went wrong?
Proposition 8 seemed to have more going against it than for it. California voters are among the nation’s most liberal, and they turned out on Nov. 4 to support Democrat Barack Obama by a whopping margin of 61-37 percent.
Popular Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger campaigned against Proposition 8.
And while same-sex marriage supporters are often outspent in ballot fights, the No on 8 campaign amassed a war chest of $38 million. That was not only the most money ever raised to defeat such a measure, but it was as much as—or more than—the amount raised by gay opponents on the Christian right.
Next: What the polls said
It passed because of all the lies and propaganda that was on the TV about Prop 8. The commercials for 8 kept saying “protect the children” and “it will teach homosexuality in the schools” (implication that GRAPHIC man-on-man sex will be taught to 5-year-old kids).
And so people responded, especially if they don’t know any gay person or think they don’t know any, to “save the children.”
Callan Mitchell,
There is something called “growing up.” And that is what a lot of gay men have done. They are now into lives of responsibilty and of mutual caring in stable, loving, committed partnerships and sometimes marriages to other men as well. As opposed to using each other for selfish gratification and then throwing each other away like lives and men were disposible playtoys. And always coming home to inner emptiness.
What you are diacovering is that more amd more gay men are leaving “Peter Pan” in other words “perpetual adolescence” behind and becoming “truly adult men” with partners and stable home lives. Men coming home at the end of the day to a wonderful hug and kiss.
They (could be any male couple) sit down to a nice meal and discuse the day’s events at work. They may perhaps take vacations together, walk their very own family pet, sit out on the back deck toether asd see the moon and stars. They likely have something wonderful and lasting. making each other’s evenings, weekends and holidays special.
Callan Mitchell, true life and true love does not exist in bathrooms, in furtive glances, cop a feel encounters, etc. taking him home, and then kicking him out the door next morning and pretending he does not exist.
Lots of luck, Callan Mitchell, I am sure there is a nice, sweet man out there who will love you true. If you are willing to change, you might one day feel liee you are indeed the luckiest guy in the world for you can have your own man and you will have something of lasting value, the love of another man you can depend on and come home to.
parent & Nancy – Your hatred and stupidity are more harmful to children than anything the gay community can come up with.
Well I have to say to the parent GET REAL you are entitled to your opinion no one ever said you had to go to the weddings. BTW what happens if one of your children now or later in life come out of the closet, are you going to be as rude as you are now or will it change, before you pass judgement think before you speak.
And what a sick dark world it is!! a bunch of deviant sexual behavior!
Poor loosers! Marriage is part of the big book, a male and a female, so then they could produce children. Not promote sexual deviency. That has caused the fall of saddam and gamorra, not to mention all the STD’s… It is not o k to go to the store and see people of the same sex making out! I dont want my impressionable children seeing this as normal, its wrong… Go back into the closet! The majority voted and spoke. It really isnt about religion. Its what the majority wanted. marraige.. One Man and One woman!
To Callan Mitchell: That is the most self centered and selfish thing I have read in a long time. You voted away your gay brother/sisters rights because YOU don’t buy into gay marriage. Good for you to have your own opinion. How horrible and selfish of you to take that choice away from someone else. You ASSUME that those of us who do want to get married buy into the HETERO version of it or raise our kids to that version. I can tell you that we don’t. The fact that you denied me and my family 1200+ CIVIL RIGHTS because you don’t like that you don’t have as many cruising spots or clubs is just ludicrious. I understand that not all gays want to marry – and I fully support that CHOICE (but because of you and those like you – now I DON’T have a choice). I understand that many gays don’t like that we’ve become mainstream – I see their points. BUT FOR ANY GAY PERSON to vote away our civil liberties is just horrific. You should be ashamed of yourself. I love the gay community and the many diverse aspects of it. I too love the gayborhoods, and having our own places to go…but I would never dream in a million years to deny any gay/lesbian/bi/transgender the right to assimilate, marry, or have casual hook-up in whatever park, bathroom, bathhouse, gloryhole office cube etc. they choose….you apparently only support the later choice and to me that is a dispicable stance.
Prop 8, like all issues in life, will only be understood and/or changed by the simple rules that created it… ’cause & effect’… ‘choice & the consequence that follows the choice’.
The ‘passage’ of Prop 8 is nothing more or less than the end result of everything that came before it… the ‘effect’, the ‘consequence’… We can all point fingers of blame at each other, whether as citizen’s, voter’s, or member’s of this or that church, but the sad truth few are willing to accept is that we were ALL victim’s of the perpetrator’s that ‘created’ Prop 8, as it is ALWAYS the perpetrator’s and/or the originator’s that instigate the ’cause’ or ‘choice’ that enabled everything from the creation of Prop 8, to the passage of Prop 8… by ANY means necessary to reach their objective.
Once again, we fell for divide & conquer techniques as old as history itself, failing to understand that ‘United we stand, Divided we fall’. How was ANYONE, regardless of race or religion, regardless of man or woman, regardless of gay or straight, duped into voting for undermining the very documents that support ALL of our right’s ! … Our Constitution & Bill of Rights … What if Prop 8 had of been about equality or the civil rights of women, African Americans, or abortion, or the right to choose and follow the religion of OUR choice … oh yeah, seems we already went there, and we STILL don’t GET IT !
The problem is NOT now, nor has it ever been the Hispanic voter’s or the African American voter’s, or the Catholic voter’s, or the Mormon voter’s as they are all nothing more or less than the tools that were USED to pass Prop 8. So what is the ’cause / choice’ ? The Church’s, whether Catholic, Mormon, or the Christian Church, and their never ending battle to be the ‘ONE’ and ‘ONLY’ that GOD favors above all others, whose followers are guilted, shamed, and threatened with Hellfire and Eternal Damnation if they fail to follow ‘Gods’ words that come from ‘Mens’ mouths !
Truth is, the Church, regardless of which one, deserves ALL the criticism and blame they are receiving for the treason of even thinking about, let alone pursuing, subverting our Constitution and Bill of Rights by substituting and or replacing the words held therein with words and or rights held in ANY Bible, whether that Bible be Christian, Catholic, Mormon, Jewish, or any other. The U.S. is NOT A THEOCRACY, AND IF THAT IS WHAT ANY CHURCH WANTS THE U.S. TO BE, THEN THEY NEED TO BE DEPORTED TO THE THEOCRATIC COUNTRY OF THIER CHOICE ASAP, AS IT IS NOT A CONSTITUTIONALLY PROTECTED RIGHT FOR A CHURCH TO DESTROY MY CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS !
Why I voted yes on proposition 8.
I am against gay marriage. Not because I’m against equality for gays and lesbians, but because I believe gay marriage is destroying gay culture. I came of age in the 1970’s, when gays were pretty much all in the closet. This meant being gay was a secret endeavor, and one that engendered a culture all of its own. A culture that I grew to love, where gays were free to explore their sexuality and lives without the cumbersome expectations that come along with mainstream heterosexual society.
The thought of getting married and having children was not even a remote possibility in those days. Gays were spontaneous and there was always a party to go to, there were all the secret meeting places to go to for anonymous gay sex. Parks, libraries, shopping malls, everywhere you went was a possible encounter. These encounters were filled with excitement and joy; I always found it appropriate that we were called the gays because we were so happy in those days.
Finding the anonymous gay hook up these days is very different. No longer do we all know the right bathroom to hit or the right park trail to take, now all the anonymous encounters are arranged via the internet, and the tricks are usually closeted straight guys who are married, inexperienced and just want to get off and go back to their wives and children. I miss the days of park hook ups with a litany of real gay guys to choose from. You could go from one trick to another without ever having to leave the same spot, and you could take one or two home for a wild night of sex. We were free to explore and enjoy our sexual selves, unencumbered with the morals of heterosexual culture.
The marriage equality movement has killed the gay lifestyle. Now we are just straight-lite. All the young gay guys now have a different idea of gay culture, namely one that mirrors the heterosexual world. They grow up not only in a family that reinforces the heterosexual model, but they also see gays on TV and in the media coupling monogamously and adopting or having children, they hear the cries for marriage equality and buy into the heterosexual morals of monogamy and family life.
I for one want to stop this movement, I want the gays back! Too many clubs have closed because gays don’t go clubbing anymore, now they date. Gays who have bought into the mainstream heterosexual culture are looking for a life-partner that they can build a home with and raise children, and be just like their boring parents and straight brothers and sisters, and it makes me sick! People follow the traditions set down before them; I was lucky enough to come of age when the traditions of the gay community were truly and uniquely our own, filled with sex and self-fulfillment. Now those traditions are being pushed aside and rapidly replaced with the mundane traditions of the heterosexual culture. This is a travesty in my opinion.
Marriage equality is killing the gay lifestyle and the uniqueness of the gay culture. It is sad to see young gays abandoning their birthright of sexual freedom in exchange for the hollow and boring life of a heterosexual couple.
I am not opposed to equality for gays and lesbians, which is why I support domestic partnerships for gays who should so choose such a life. A domestic partnership may have all the rights of a marriage, but will never be considered by anyone, gay or straight, to be the cultural equivalent of marriage. Marriage defines and shapes heterosexual culture. Children are indoctrinated into accepting it as the norm from birth, and thus strive to achieve it, regardless of the fact that the majority of such marriages end in divorce and broken families, and ultimately the discontent of a nation of followers. Gays have always been freed from this servitude by the fact that they could not even aspire to such a lifestyle, so we were free to create our own existence. An existence based upon what made us happy as opposed to what we were expected to do or become.
I voted yes on proposition 8 because only such laws can preserve the unique nature of the gay culture, for without such laws, we will disappear, becoming nothing more than everyone else, robbing the gay youth of tomorrow of all the joys we experienced in a gay culture freed from the restrictions of monogamy as advocated the heterosexual culture.
And I think that going after the Mormon church and other Christian organizations is poor strategy. We’ll only come off looking like we’re attacking religion, and that’s a losing battle in the USA in ‘08. (Not to mention how good Christians are at being martyrs.)
A better strategy would be to do the hard political work of getting the laws changed around religions doing organizational work for ballot amendments. Right now, what the churches did was pretty much legal. What shouldn’t be legal, IMO, is the letter writing, the petitions at the back of the church, the use of church property and resources to politic, the funneling of church members into the political organizations. It’s the *organizing* piece that should be illegal. When churches do this, they effectively act as the “Yes on Prop [whatever]” campaign, with pre-built money, resources, audiences, and so on. The other side has to build their political organization from scratch. It’s an unfair advantage.
>Californian arrogance, that’s what went wrong.
I had thought I might not go there, but since the door’s been opened…. (Nice post Rodney.)
If you guys still have it, pull out the Advocate from last June or so, the one about CA winning the court case for gay marriage. Skim the articles, and see if you can see what I did from way over here in Massachusetts. (FWIW, I dropped a few hundred dollars supporting the CA fight, and I *really* wanted another state to have gay marriage other than MA, so we could stop being portrayed as being such weird people in such a weird state.)
Every article in that issue of the Advocate was just dripping with incredible arrogance and self absorption. You had to go approximately 10 articles deep before it was mentioned that there was another state that had gay marriage. And the vibe to the whole thing was, “Nothing that really came before regarding gay marriage was all that significant. Now that CA has it, that’s all that really matters. And it’s just a matter of time before we roll this out to the whole country. As goes CA, so goes the rest of the USA.” On the one hand, I suppose you could dismiss my reaction to wanting MA to get credit for being first. But there was so much more to it than that; I wanted a “We’re all in this together!” feeling, and…well, it didn’t feel that way.
If we in MA had faced a vote five months after our courts gave us gay marriage, we probably would have lost marriage rights here. It took us a few years to get the polling to the point where we got 50% plus support for gay marriage.
But here’s the Advocate, declaring happy days are here again. Even two *years* after the courts gave us gay marriage, we were down in the polling in the legislature when it came time for another vote…it took some hard, strategic politicking and a LOT of help from the governor and other leaders to swing those handful of legislators. We almost lost that vote, too.
I think it gets back to Rodney’s point that CA folks thought they were different, and that other efforts weren’t all that important or even relevant. How else can you explain the lack of urgency that they were facing a ballot referendum in five months? Or that they used a strategy completely *opposite* of what worked in MA (we focused on showing our families and stressing how marriage helps our kids)?
I thought it was interesting that the brains and legal talent behind the win in Connecticut included a lot of the same people who engineered the win in Massachusetts. Someone smartly piggy backed off a successful effort. Let’s keep piggy backing. We’re all in this together!
The No on 8 campaign was the most innept political campaign I’ve ever seen in my five decades on this planet. And I’m not saying that just in hindsight; I said that every time I saw one of their inept commercials. All they had were dull talking heads telling the viewer what to do. No one likes to be told what to do. We don’t like being told we can’t marry. The other side doesn’t like being told they have to recognize our marriages. You tell a person what to do, you get push-back. A top-notch political PR organization could have come up with ways to convey our point without sounding like a pedantic social studies teacher. Most of the time, you couldn’t even tell it was a No on 8 commercial unless you paid attention, and who pays attention to political commercials that have nothing more than talking heads? We live in a world of DVRs; everyone has a fast forward button. The activists in charge needed to listen to people besides themselves and hire creative people to sell their point.
I think we all know what went wrong.
Mormon funding and the en masse black evangelical and latino support it got when they came out to vote for Obama. Who’s own repeated stance, saying he believed marriage was between one man and one woman and that our rights were for individual states to decide, basically exactly what Cali just did, didn’t help in making any inroads within these communities of color.
What about what’s going down now?
I’ve just heard an add by the right wing group called The national organization for marriage that’s basically accusing us of harassing groups and blacklisting individuals who voted for Prop 8. They really are the masters of spin. They beat us, promote discrimination toward us through their religion and take away our rights, and when we cry foul they accuse us of intimidation and wrong doing!
So if no one saw the “No on 8″ campaign, then where did the $38 million go? Who has it? Where is the accountability? Did someone from the “Yes on 8″ pretend to be a “No on 8″ activist and side track the money and the campaign?
I understand the need to donate to a cause, but how does one find out if the cause is real, authorized and has decent and appropriate management?
Never deny the fact, no … not for even one minute, that our opponents would infiltrate our cause and side track the efforts. Look at how many of our “supposed friends” who took our money and then donated to the other side.
Perhaps we need to have a reputable 3rd party group audit the groups to whom we give our time and money and know they are legitimate, have experienced management, and put forth a plan for success, BEFORE we donate to the cause.
And, perhaps we should demand that the existing groups, HRC, ACLU, etc. also donate both money, and expertise, and OVERT advertising, to the cause, and FORCE EARMARK our contributions to be used appropriately.
WE NEED ACCOUNTABILITY FROM OUR REPRESENTATIVE ORGANIZATIONS.
NO ON 8, PUBLISH YOUR USE OF OUR MONEY, OR WE WILL SUE TO GET IT.
I don’t understand why gay families weren’t shown. The commercials I saw from No On 8 were funny, but was funny what we really needed?
I wanted this all to be taken seriously, not lightly. I wanted Prop 8 to be shown for what it really is, and attack on MY FAMILY.
Not just some theoretical indignity or abstract oversight. It is an attack on my family. Any measures like Prop 8 are basically aimed at the very definition of millions of families in America, telling them that they don’t count as families.
Why didn’t they show that? Why didn’t they show a real family and say, “These are the people that you are condemning to a state of legal limbo, increased financial distress, and situations that are detrimental to their health!”