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Loading ...Prop 8 Exclusive: Young gay marriage activist leads national protests
“You know that book, The Tipping Point?” asks the young Internet maven, referring to Malcolm Gladwell’s 2000 work exploring cultural shifts and the small things that incite them. “Well, on Sunday night, I said to myself, “Holy crap. We’re at the tipping point!”
Little did she know how viral this thing would become.
“Join the Impact” began as a blog post and email template by Willow Witte, a friend of Balliett’s who had sent the missive to inspire friends after the passage of California’s anti-gay marriage Proposition 8.
The success of similar propositions in Arizona and Florida, as well as an anti-gay adoption measure in Arkansas, only added gravity to the situation. Witte encouraged contacts to forward the note to their local LGBT groups to solicit plans of community action. Balliett responded to her friend’s email saying, according to a post on the site, “We shouldn’t wait, we need to mobilize now, and we need to on a national level, at the exact same moment, throughout the country.”
And mobilize they did: this past Friday, Nov. 7, ‘”Join the Impact” hit the web. Five hours later, the site logged 10,000 visitors. Apparently a lot of other people shared the young women’s desire to turn despair into resolve.
By midnight, 20 cities’ worth of young volunteers had signed on to organize protests against the discriminatory propositions.
The next evening, Nov. 8, the site had tripled its hits.
By Monday morning, a plan had emerged: Cities around the country would organize their own efforts to coordinate a synchronized protest for Sat., Nov. 15, 10:30 a.m. PST. The movement became officially global with hits from the UK and France, and by Nov. 11, over one million visitors had come to the site.
Across the country, posts on Craigslist, bulletins on MySpace, and emails on ListServs with titles like “Meet at City Hall next weekend!” and “Upset about Prop 8? Here’s what YOU can do about it,” began to buzz with notice of the upcoming national protest.
NEXT PAGE: Who is Amy Balliett?
First I want to apologize for my grammar and miss spellings in my last comments; I was in a hurry to go to work
If God were to descend on earth and say those things Ross, I can say absolutely that you would be compelled to follow His edicts because you would not be able to stand up to the power and glory He would radiate (I mean, we are talking about the Creator of the universe here). But at least you’re acknowledging the possibility of there being a God. And again, if there is one, then we have the responsibility to follow the commands He has given us, whether we agree with them or not. This nation started as a Christian nation, or least a nation that followed Christian principles (Read the Declaration of Independence). But as time has gone on those principles have gone by the wayside with the “if it feels good, do it” mentality, and so we see the rise of such things as diseases and broken marriage relationships, all in the name of “freedom”, which is just another way of saying “no responsibility” and rebellion from God. And it’s going to get worse until God fulfills His promise of returning and straightening all this mess out. Just keep asking yourself “What if I’m wrong?”
However Steve you are assuming that the US legal code needs to comply with Christian dogma.
Even if the clouds were to open up and the Abrahamic GOD were to descend from the sky and say, “I am your creator! This is my son Jesus, and I never talked to any guy named Mohamed. And I this is how I want things done.” Even then; we would not be compelled as Americans to follow his edicts. (For example I’ll say God says “I don’t want you to have guns.”) Even in this scenario where Christianity is 100% proven to be true, it is still my right as an American citizen to own a gun. Or I could decide to convert to Islam, or Judaism, or become a Hari Krishna for that matter. God has NO INFLUENCE WHAT-SO-EVER on US law.
So quite frankly I don’t CARE what your god has to say about marriage; live and let live I say. What I DO care about is that accourding to a few of your holy men, he doesn’t want me to enter into a social contract with the person I love; and therefore the people who represent both you AND ME decide that I shouldn’t be able to enter into said social contract.
In summation; YOUR god has NO CONTROL over ME as an AMERICAN.
To MNBear: I understand what you’re saying. To me it what you’re saying is viable from a point of view that all we are are higher forms of animals that happen to now come to the point where the media and humanistic scientists have declared that the gay lifestyle is something that everyone just has a hard time accepting. However, there is a God that did not design relationships like that to happen. To give a simplified illustration, it’s like you painting a picture and someone comes along and defaces it in some way.
Evolution cannot be since it is impossible to produce life from non-living materials and there is plenty of evidence if one really seeks to learn with an honest heart that God has a plan for the people He created, but He’s not going to force it on people since that will create robots instead of people He can love and have a relationship. And many other things like drugs, pornography, abortion, euthanasia etc. can be explained whether it is right or wrong if we accept His ways. Otherwise, yes, we have no objective reason to say anything because we’re just animals and there is no higher standard to obey. Then it is just as right for be to be “bigoted” because that’s the way I feel and no one can tell me different. I’m not bigoted though.
Addendum to #5 from the last comment… required in order to make the argument complete. Where IS the concrete effect on others’ rights if same-sex couples are allowed to marry? Even if one were to grant the (unfortunate) premise that homosexuality is some kind of evil (a premise that only the most hardened Christians now buy), do they really think straight Californians with plans to marry ditched their high school sweethearts en masse when they learned they could now travel Matrimony Parkway as a queer? Anyone who really thinks that people are kept straight only by social and Biblical condemnation of gays from an early age has a completely flawed understanding of human psychology.
Now, on to the lovely Steve.
6. “It still amazes me that gays think of themselves as a group on par with blacks or such for purposes of getting special ‘rights’ when all they are are a group of people that define themselves by what they do in the bedroom (or outside the bedroom nowadays).”
I suppose you’re right – we’re not like blacks at all. We never face discrimination in employment, housing, or other social settings… we never face the prospect of being physically attacked because of a simple fact about who we are, and then maybe even hitting the brick wall of a law-enforcement establishment that lets it slide because, hell, Cletus, he’s only a QUAHR! Oh, and we can marry people of the opposite sex just like black people could marry other black people. Narrowing legal definitions in the first place means no discrimination exists under those definitions!
And don’t think we didn’t catch the “special rights” angle in there. How does wanting the same assurances that you have about a number of legal issues constitute “special rights”? How is it “special rights” to want things straight couples take for granted: the guarantee that we’ll be able to visit our life partner in the hospital without officious administrative interference; the “backup plan” that, in the unfortunate event we die without a will, everything passes to our life partner by simple operation of law; the ability to own property in common without having to jump through dozens of legal hoops; right on down to the ability to avoid JAIL when the registration on our partner’s car reveals his name instead of our own?
As for attempting to reduce us to our bedroom practices: that one’s so trite, I’m surprised it isn’t growing cobwebs. We as individuals are no more defined by our bedroom practices than anyone else is; it’s OTHERS’ disparate treatment that defines us separately. We’re only seen as a distinct subset defined by sexual practices because various people choose to discriminate against us ON that very basis.
7. “So are we going to give special treatment to others for the different behaviors they exercise, such as pedophiles, murderers, or thieves?”
Minor children are unable to give consent to sexual contact, and are emotionally damaged by predators who force sex on them at an early age. Murderers terminate the lives of their victims. Thieves remove property to which their victims were legally entitled. Common thread: outward damage not consented by the receiving party.
Sure, make your last-ditch argument that homosexuality is “spiritually harmful”, but abstract harm is not harmful in the sense universally recognized as damaging to society (the way concrete harm to unconsenting individuals is). As an unabashed secular humanist, I find the dogmatic tendencies of certain religions “harmful” in the psychological sense, but I would never even remotely begin to consider outlawing these religions on that basis. Not everyone agrees with me that they’re harmful… plus, anyone who chooses to join them is making a conscious adult decision of her own. The nanny state is scary enough without turning it into the nunny state.
8. “How can the gay lifestyle be so normal when the only way gays can reproduce is by getting their numbers through the heterosexual community or artificial insemination?”
Holy moly. There may be a million ways to knock this one over. But since 999,998 of them are fairly redundant (involving wind gusts of between 1 and 3 mph), I’ll limit myself to two.
Absurdity under similar logic: How can the ecclesiastical lifestyle be “normal” when priests, monks and nuns, having given religious vows that include celibacy, are unable to produce other priests, monks and nuns?
Or, exposure of hidden warrant: Argument requires us to believe that gays only come from gay parents. Just try that one on my straight, happily married folks (united in matrimony since the Carter administration, three years before I was born). Yes, many of us do take the position that sexual orientation is biologically determined (either partially or fully)… but, given our origin as gametes in bodies at least straight enough to consider heterosexual relations, this would probably have to result from the interactions of multiple genes. And if it does turn out to be environmental (either partially or fully), this just returns anti-gay folks to the position of having to argue the evils of homosexuality EMPIRICALLY (i.e. for some reason NOT resting upon inherently undemonstrable spiritual premises that the rest of the audience may be unprepared to accept), PLUS having to argue why, if the behavior is indeed morally lacking, it is the proper role of a government to curtail it. (These ARE two analytically distinct issues).
9. “How are they going to get sympathy by the public if they keep on trying to intimidate others who don’t agree with them?”
Cite examples of these purported “intimidation practices”, please. The only one that comes to mind is fairly benign. Namely, if you find yourself “intimidated” by people out in the street speaking their minds with cardboard signs, please do yourself the great favor of moving to Saudi Arabia or North Korea or some place kindred thereto, where such unseemly behavior is summarily dispatched by means typically involving small chunks of lead.
10. “The gay community is just as ‘bigoted’ towards those they disagree with as those they claim are against them. They don’t even want to try and understand Christian life that God offers them.”
Sorry, but there’s a world of difference between “simply being dug in for one’s position” and bigotry. The former involves only tenacity; the latter is an active attempt to deny people civil rights and human dignity.
If GLBT folks wanted to prevent you from meeting in your churches and *expressing the opinion* that homosexuality is wrong, destructive, etc., then perhaps we could justly be tarred with the latter epithet. But, by itself, our committed refusal to buy your position does not constitute bigotry, any more than does yours in the other direction. The difference is that (aside from a very small, very vocal fraction) we DON’T wish to impinge upon your right to meet in your churches and preach that homosexuality is sinful… while your groups DO want to (at the very least) prevent us from marrying and, in some cases, even make our very existence and our private behavior illegal once more.
WHEEE! This is what happens when a bear has spare time in November… after foraging, but before hibernation… He uses his claws (that, er, GOD gave him) to tear apart tendentious illogic!
1. Jason Miller (definitely not the benign Mrs. Miller of Dave Sevillian childhood fantasy) states: “Everyone already has equal rights when it comes to marriage. If you read the definition of marriage… the definition doesn’t state anything about a bond between a man and a man or a bond between a woman and a woman.”
Yes, that’s right, folks – appeal to an existing legal definition in order to argue that the legal definition ought not to be changed in recognition of civil rights. Bootstrap-a-go-go for the status quo. It was just like that before / we shall keep it evermore. Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t find naked appeals to the past all that convincing. I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.
2. “Also, if you think about the equality part, everyone has the same exact right, which is to marry someone of the opposite sex.”
An argument correct in form, but empty in substance. This is a “right” to marry someone which whom the gay or lesbian individual can never form the unique complex of physical and emotional attraction underlying any relationship with the “oomph” to progress to marriage. If you want to take all the meaning out of marriage by reducing its essence to an empty textbook formalism, be my guest – but you’ll have only yourself to thank, not GLBT people.
3. “Legally, this is not decided by the church, since in this county [sic], there is a seperation of church and state.”
This confuses theory with practice. Yes, in theory, we have a wall of separation between church and state in this country – but who are the ones trying their damnedest to keep same-sex marriage down? That’s right – religious institutions. Not that they don’t have a right to express their opinions in daily political discourse… but their positions are such blatant expressions of dogma as to border on assertions that they have an inalienable RIGHT to direct public policy in the direction (they claim is) desired by God. If you don’t think their arguments are theocratic in nature, then how do you explain their position that their personal religious freedom is threatened solely by the fact that sometimes, a law is passed allowing others to do things that don’t square with the beliefs of a particular religion?
4. “I find it rather sickening, to see that in this country, we the people can make a decition, not only once, but TWICE about something, and people protest it.”
Oh golly… not protest! Not THAT! Once something is decided upon, the whole issue should be dropped for eternity… not struggled with in the very same political and argumentative process that the Constitution and its underlying philosophy specifically defend!
5. “Now, the SECOND time the people of California have decide against same sex marriage, the people who dont like that decision, which has made by more that a 500,000 voter differnce, want to chance it. If WE THE PEOPLE bow to the special interest for every decision made, this country won’t be about WE the people, it will be about US THE FEW.”
So anyone who gets out and argues the contrary position on the substance of an issue now constitutes a “special interest”? Funny – “special interests”, in the traditional sense of that term, are usually represented by powerful lobbyists with direct financial access to Washington, yet I don’t recall ever going on a junket to Aruba with a Congressman or receiving massive subsidies from the public fisc for the propagation of religious dogma disguised as “faith-based programs”. I don’t remember ever trying to cut into the rights of others in the process of seeking rights of my own.
Would you mind telling me how my ability to marry a same-sex partner – receiving the same CIVIL rights associated with a marriage – would do the slightest thing to your personal interests? In the sense that, say, the expenditure of tax dollars on a useless pork-barrel project in your district would affect you? Believe me, contrary to religious-right propaganda, most of us within the broader GLBT movement do not want to curtail religion’s right to speak its mind, or even its right to refuse RELIGIOUS recognition of same-sex marriages – we just want equal treatment under the LAW.
But perhaps this brings to the forefront a broader (and ever-ebbing and flowing) idea in American politics: the constant conflict between “majority rule” and “individual rights”. As much as you lean on your concept of “majority rule”, we are nevertheless not a simple democracy, but a constitutional republic that balances majoritarianism with fundamental individual liberties (out of a recognition of fundamental human dignity, and in order to prevent majorities from calcifying into totalitarian tyrannies).
In other words, majority opinion aside, there are realms in which the government is simply not allowed to enter. For the past 40 years or so, our constitutional jurisprudence has been trending strongly in the direction of including in these realms any matter involving a purely individual behavior (i.e. one without observable, *concrete* effects on the rights of others) – and I believe rightly so. This approach is the only one that reads as internally consistent with other constitutional principles (e.g. the requirement of standing – personal impact, some “case or controversy” – in order to bring a court case), and it’s the only one that squares with the essential nature of a country founded by pioneers and mavericks who were willing to risk their lives to escape religious domination in their homeland.
I think that everyone who supported the no on 8 movement seems to have not realised something, which is that everyone already has equal rights when it comes to marriage.
If you read the definition of marriage it states “a legal bond between a man and a woman in order to live together and often to have children”. The definition doesn’t state anything about a bond between a man and a man or a bond between a woman and a woman. Also, if you think about the equality part, everyone has the same exact right, which is to marry someone of the opposite sex. Legally, this is not decided by the church, since in this county, there is a seperation of church and state.
I find it rather sickening, to see that in this country, we the people can make a decition, not only once, but TWICE about something, and people protest it. Californian voters, decided two seperate times to not allow same sex marriage in this state. The first time it was overturned by 4 judges who were more concerned about thier own political stances, than what the people actually decide on. Now, the SECOND time the people of California have decide against same sex marriage, the people who dont like that decision, which has made by more that a 500,000 voter differnce, want to chance it. If WE THE PEOPLE bow to the special interest for every decision made, this country won’t be about WE the people, it will be about US THE FEW.
I’m a straight man with many gay friends.The way I see it if you can find a bit of love in this world,you’re doing good.Cheers
It still amazes me that gays think of themselves as a group on par with blacks or such for purposes of getting special “rights” when all they are are a group of people that define themselves by what they do in the bedroom (or outside the bedroom nowadays). So are we going to give special treatment to others for the different behaviors they exercise, such as pedophiles, murderers, or thieves? How can the gay lifestyle be so normal when the only way gays can reproduce is by getting their numbers through the heterosexual community or artificial insemination? Lastky, how are they going to get sympathy by the public if they keep on trying to intimidate others who don’t agree with them? The gay community is just as “bigoted” towards those they disagree with as those they claim are against them. They don’t even want to try and understand Christian life that God offers them.
“they want to spend the rest of their life with should have to choose the church that is going to give them the type of marriage they wish to have.”
No church for me, their all a bunch of lairs with tails that don’t add up. Churches should not have the ability to approve of who marries who, the government should grant the masses the right to marry whom they choose be it same sex or not.
Then, and only then should the specific church decide if they want acknowledge it or not. If they do, great. if not, who cares what they think we’ll still be married.
It´s a very good proposition, and i´m agree with the idea of LGBT community ” come together after propos 8″. Unhappily i haven´t a site to join this!!
I believe that we should begin targeting the bigots where it will really piss them off. We should be protesting in a legal area outside of christian based elementary schools as the buses and suv’s drop their children off in the morning . After all is this not what they are really afraid of?
So now after decades of disinterest, many of us in the LGBTI community have AWAKENED. And we will refuse to pay one penny of income tax to the IRS until the government (i.e. – you) decide you WANT our tax dollars as EQUAL CITIZENS.
This ain’t a vote.
This ain’t a debate.
This definately ain’t a popularity contest!
You will PAY OUR TAXES until we have what your family ALREADY HAS; your apathy is costing you money as you read
this. GAY TAX PROTEST.
I agree..great job! Too bad there is no rally where I’ll be Saturday, but I’ll have NPR on the radio to hear the national coverage.
It saddens me to hear the comments about HRC. They had so much promise. But, when they coddled up to the very religious forces that work to tear us apart, I begged them to rethink. They ignored me and I quit. They still call for money and I still tell them religion won’t get one thin dime of my money. I’ve written Mr. Solmonese several times only to fall on deaf ears.
Why are we “sleeping with the enemy”?
Let’s all please learn one thing from Prop 8: religion is no friend of the gay rights movement and we need to FIGHT THEIR DISCRIMINATION TOOTH AND NAIL.
Trying to get them to “accept” us is giving in to our needing to be accepted as a separate group. I prefer not to accept them! I don’t accept religious people judging me nor anyone else. I don’t accept religious people having gay friends but being against their rights. I DON’T ACCEPT RELIGIOUS PEOPLE.
If someone in our movement remains religious after the thousands of years of torment, I really pity them. Let’s stop giving our money to groups that appease religious hatred, couch it in terms of “understanding” and “tolerance”. My famile IS NOT to be tolerated, we are to be given equal protection under the law. period. the secular law, by the way.
Go Amy!!!!!!!!!! May HRC learn from their erroneous strategy and dump religious outreach altogether.
Good For you Amy! The gay rights movement needs fewer corporate lobbyists feathering their own nests like HRC and way more people like you! Thank you Thank you Thank you!
Government should not be in the business of issuing marriage licenses for bigots who want a religious marriage ceremony. Isn’t that a direct conflict between church and state? Let the cults and sects issue their own and the government can issue civil licenses that have absolutely no religious component. Maybe those who have a religious ceremony should receive fewer entitlements that marriage brings since religion and religious marriage are not supposed to be propped up by the state in regard to tax breaks and other benefifts and privileges afforded only to opposite sex marriages.