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Loading ...Report from California: Why we shouldn’t despair over Prop 8
Don’t get me wrong: We can be very, very sad about Prop 8.
None of the gay and lesbian couples who have been married in California managed to even reach a 6-month anniversary before this election.
And The Mormon Church alone poured $20 million into the Yes on 8 campaign. Twenty million dollars that could have been used to feed the hungry, train people for jobs, or build a hospital a cancer wing instead got used to make misleading ads to stop people who just wanted to marry each other in peace.And the people of California, the great bastion of liberal tolerance, have just decided to set aside a group of people and take away a fundamental right.
All of that is sickening and sad.
But what I saw volunteering for the No on 8 campaign was amazing.
This was the largest movement for GLBT rights in history.
I worked with people who were gay, straight, bi, and transgendered, and from every ethnic, age, and economic group.
I’m still touched by the number of straight people I volunteered with who didn’t have a gay sibling, cousin, or uncle. Technically, Prop 8 didn’t affect them personally, but they took the stance that any discriminatory law affects them personally. That is progress.
Thousands of people volunteered to stand outside of polling places for anywhere from four to fourteen hours on Election Day. More people volunteered than any of the No on 8 leaders had dreamed of - the Silverlake phone bank I worked at met its goal for Election Day recruiting five days early and kept on going. That is progress.
And Barack Obama got elected. We can finally say goodbye to the Presidential regime that actively promoted fear and hatred of the GLBT community and hello to moving forward in tolerance and acceptance. That is one hell of a lot of progress.
Several of my friends have asked me how Prop 8 happened in crazy-for-Obama California, and I think it was only last night that I truly understood. My last polling place was in a mixed neighborhood - half-hipster, half deeply religious. I was positioned on a corner by a stop sign.
And car after car took, as I gradually realized, an extra-long stop at the empty intersection while the driver took a moment to look at me. Just to look.
It wasn’t a hate stare. It was a zoo stare. People were looking at me because they thought they might be seeing someone with a different sexual orientation for the first time, and they wanted to know what one looked like. They were living, socializing, and going to church in a community where it’s not OK to be out, and they really didn’t know that, yes, they probably have met gay and bi people before, and might even be related to a few.
Prop 8 didn’t happen because of hatred, it happened because of ignorance. And ignorance is something that chips away. As we make it easier for people in all communities to understand that, yes, they do have gay neighbors and bi siblings and transgendered aunts and they’re actually pretty nice people and the world hasn’t fallen apart, Prop 8 will seem sadder and sillier. And it will go away.
Ignorance is something we can handle. It just takes time.
Please don’t despair.
Ali Davis is a writer and performer in Los Angeles.
Thank you for the wise comments. This was my point earlier in that there was great irony in the election of a minority president and the removal of rights for another minority. We must be very careful to bring understanding to all parts of society as we move forward, and cannot focus on the high-profile antagonists against our rights (read - stanch right Mormon and/or other religious groups.) We can succeed, but have to be comfortable in reaching out to everyone!
Don’t despair over Prop 8 in California? Forgive me if I’m upset. But besides California, how about the votes against gay rights in Arkansas, Arizona, and Florida? Should we get happy about them too? And when exactly can I expect to see the Obama administration make any progress on gay rights?
Thanks for the pathetic bleeding-heart apologism. There is no reason to be happy about a “little bit” of progress. Would straight people have to wait for their civil rights to become popular enough to become law? No. It is inexcusable that religious fundamentalist trash are claiming that we LGBT people destroy the “sanctity of marriage”, yet they don’t give a damn about convicted serial killers and other psychopaths marrying multiple times while in prison! There is no reason why we should negotiate and hold the hand of these fools. We should not need to suffer and wait for equality because of their idiotic, unfounded and outdated doctrines. Where do we draw the line at how much we sit back and take from these tyrants? When they are throwing us into internment camps, will you then say “well, don’t despair. At least they provided us knitting needles and coloring books to occupy our time.”? Just because the explicit governmental tyrant is being replaced with an implicit governmental tyrant is no reason to think we have progressed. Being complacent and accepting this second-class citizen status is what will cause us to lose. We must stand and fight. We cannot rely on political whores and breeders to “give” us our rights. We were born with rights. It’s time we assert them and make the establishment acknowledge them. It’s time to stand up and proclaim “I am a human being, GOD DAMN IT! My life has value!” Those who oppose us are wrong. They are plain wrong, and you cannot compromise truth with falsehood. If we know 2+2=4, and they claim 2+2=5, we cannot try to compromise and say that 2+2=4.5, now can we? We are right about our civil liberties; they are wrong. There is no middle ground in that.
Not only is it ignorance, it’s humans not accepting the possibility that they are WRONG on some moral issue on the basis of their current belief system. In other words, we have a certain set of beliefs (marriage = man + woman) because of whatever reasons (religious, etc.) and when we are confronted with challenges to these beliefs from an external source, instead of critically evaluating our beliefs, we “rationalize” away the challenge so that we can say that our beliefs are the right ones. Unfortunately, people tend to ignore objective, external factors (such as the LGBT or equal rights communities) until they are confronted with something or someone they are intimate enough with to even develop a particle of emotion that is necessary for them to realize that they just might be wrong.
I am horribly depressed, how can I not be!? This is like a slap in the face of not only equality and human rights, but also to Science. What have we (”we” so as not to point fingers & because we are all guilty of being human) learned about the human race thus far? It appears that we have not learned much.
But hopefully people will turn around as they become more knowledgeable on what their actions will result in.
What happened in California last night was indeed sad. However, people seem to be forgetting about the state of Connecticut. Gay marriage was legalized there a couple of months ago and some opponents of gay marriage were trying to call for a Constitutional Convention to re-write the CT Constitution to ban it. The question was put to voters yesterday and they totally rejected the convention idea.
http://www.wfsb.com/politics/17894516/detail.html
Kudos to the people of Connecticut! There is still hope!
I was with you up to the last paragraph. Proposition 8 DID happen because of hatred and because of fear,and self-doubt, and self-loathing and through ignnorance of the voters. Yes, folks will eventually come to realize that hatred simply breeds more of the same.
This is not the time to lie down and accept this travesty of justice. These ignorant people will remain so if we in the Gay community don’t get out there and become teachers. Be OUT, be PROUD and be SEEN.
When you are young, time is, for the most part on your side. If you still don’t have the right to marry when you are my age (very nearly 60)I suspect you will not feel as hopeful. I’m counting on your generation to see the struggle for civil rights as a wholistic concept, one that leaves no person standing outside of any basic right granted to others in our society.
I wish it were as simple as just ignorance. Ignorance doesn’t explain away people like my aunt who has know me all of my life and for 35 years I have tried to educate her and have not succeeded. For people like her, it is not ignorance.
I don’t have that much constructive to add, but I wanted to thank you for some uplifting words of optimism. I don’t even live in the States, but these ballots have touched me personally in a way that few other political changes have even at local levels. I think it’s because that for the first time I see that it’s regular people that are responsible for determining the possibilities I’m going to have in my life, not my personal vote cast towards a political party; governments are no longer trying to be more liberal in the face of opposition and I suppose the lobby groups have changed their focus from working the politicians to working the people. The only way to take a stand against that is to be vocal, and to show that gay people are not this scary unknown thing but regular folks, and that regular folks are nothing like what they are portrayed in the Media or your family gathering or your church. Oddly enough, a political process a third around the world had influenced how I present myself and the situations I’ll tackle. It’s time to meet people head on, politely, instead of hoping for a company policy or a liberal local climate intervene. Realizing this, I’m grateful to be backed by an article like this, and the sentiment to not despair. It makes it easier, for me.
pardon me if i’m wrong but shouldnt the actual constitutionality of a constitutional ammendment made by one human against another be called into question also? this isnt a higher tax or water authority question we’re talking about here i dont think a vote to control someone else’s life is in any way constitutional no matter what state u live in
Ummm… no. It was hatred, not ignorance. They hate us. If we continue to rely on the electorate to defend our rights, we will lose them all.
Is there any legal stance (like law Suits ) that the already married couples can file agaisnt the stat of CA?
Prop 8 and all the other amendments were born in hatred. Those that supported the measures used “quaint” little terms like defending traditional marriage and children to prey on the fears of the ignorant. I’ve seen this all too often in my 40 years of life. I remember a time when those that hate us used the terms “equal rights, not special rights.”
For those of you that have sewn your hopes and faiths up in Obama and the Democratic party, I certainly hope you are right. On a day when so many people seem to be happy, all I see is that we remain third class citizens.
Thanks. You made me feel better. I live in Pasadena which is on the edge of inland southern california. I know the ‘zoo stare.’ I live with it every day. Having moved here from San Francisco a few years ago I had to get accustomed to it. And the good news is I get less of them (although when I wear my pink hastings law school outlaw tshirt I seem to get more…)
I’m still saddened by what happened. And my impatience makes me waiver between that and anger. Ignorance is a tough thing to dismantle. It requires so much patience. Reading your column helps…the humor draws me in. The wisdom brings me back.
Thanks again.
larry,
There are arguments that differentiates between “coercion” and “freedom from coercion” or the absence of it.
I don’t think the heart of the argument lies in the concept of control. The state exercises a lot of control over people’s lives (paternalistic legislation and etc).
It is, rather, an argument over the restriction of liberty or the denial of autonomy. It is also a question of the “separation of church and state”.
What is particularly interesting to me is the initiative process in general and how it makes the judicial process obsolete.
In my opinion, there should be an overwhelming consensus on an issue in order to alter such an important document as a state’s constitution. When something is split 50/50 (or close to it), that would appear to warrant more research or time to think about the topic in question. No one will be satisfied when an issue is decided by a mere 2-3% more votes.