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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.
All I know is is Pendorah’s Phat Azz is done already out the box!
It is on now! All we have to do is bring our happy GLBT (OF ALL BACKGROUNDS, THE RAINBOW) butts to march on DC (east coast), I say we go on the ONE YEAR ANNIVERSERY that the 1st gay couple got married in San Fran., the day Newsom married the first couple! That gives GLBT and equality Like minded people of any background, race, creed, whatever to organize and take our millions to the will be President OBAMA!
Lets show him and others just how big our rainbow family can be!
This is religious bigotry and hatred pure and simple. It’s about time religions are held to account. For starters, their tax exempt status should be revoked, and since religion, unlike sexual orientation, IS a choice, all civil rights protections for religion should be revoked.
Give it time maybe Obama can help resolve these illegal amendments. Don,t give in to hate.Stay calm .
I too stood on several corners during election day in Lake County California….
I couldn’t tell through the tinted glass windows, but there was a lot of response…thunbs up the finder, I just don’t really know.
Don’t despair for this is only part of our struggle. Equality of all will prevail, for we are literally the last that legal discrimination if still ok.
love to us all………
Ali, I’ll agree with you that many of the people who voted for Prop 8 did so out of ignorance, or because they were lead down the moron path by religious leaders hungry for their money. But there is another group of people, people who despise us or fear us or both, and often use religion to justify it. These are not the people who look at us like we are zoo animals, they look at us more like predators who want to kill us for sport or imagined survival. This group is hard to reach, because (to paraphrase Sam Harris) when someone justifies their beliefs by saying it’s the will of God, all discussion ends. We may never get the haters to see us as human, but the homophobes and the ignorant are reachable, and that’s got to be our true mission.
I am beyond infuriated over this and I don’t even live in California. I feel like this has set the gay rights movement back 10 years. I really believe that we are on the verge of where the African-Americans were in the early 60’s. Now is the time to take action! The rage in me is beyond words. I don’t care if Liz Taylor has been married 8 times, or if Britney had an 18 hour marriage, you know why, because its none of my business. It’s time these religious nutcases do the same!
Let me add to my previous comment. I wasn’t surprised at the results of the Arkansas amendment. Afterall, if it were up to them, women still wouldn’t have the right to vote, and slavery would still be legal. California on the other hand…wow, I’m just stunned. I just can’t believe that the most progressive state in the nation has taken this step backwards in human rights. It’s seriously time for us to take action!
You’re right, Prop was a low blow for the Civil rights community at large, but we can persever.
Today is bittersweet and ironic; bittersweet because we have lost our civil rights thanks to many Obama supporters, especially the African-American community who voted for Prop 8 by a large margin. Least I sound like a Republican or a racist I am neither and wish I could ignore the obvious, but if we are to discover why we lost, we must be truthful and acknowledge that this group needs to relearn their own history. I lived in the Fillmore in the 1980s and rode the buses, and I will never forget the homophobic diatribes of Black youth. I was shocked how vehemently these kids hated us, and grew to understand that they learned this at home and in church. The campaign against Prop 8 did not take this reality into account largely because it is very politically incorrect: I don’t enjoy pointing the finger either, but if it looks, swims and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. Sorry.
Once more people it is simply put:
MARRIAGE IS A SECULAR CONTRACT. ALL PEOPLE HAVE A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO MAKE CONTRACTS IN THE UNITED STATES.
If we also use the secular argument “Marriage is a contract, and the people cannot take away the right to contract from anyone” because it is protected by the US Constitution, and further it has been upheld by the US Supreme Court for 200 years, and ruled a basic right of all people in the US to make contracts.
The “marriage contract” is enshrined in the laws to simply make it a simple matter to wed, and to have some semblance order. If it is not a contract, then why are “prenuptial agreements” even legal and why do divorce agreements have to be made by the courts? They are modifications to the basic secular contract enacted into law.
If we do this, then the religious idiots and the evil bigots cannot possibly have a leg to stand on. And any such challenge to marriage contract will fail miserably.
The Zoo Look is something we are all very familiar with.
Ali, there is plenty of hate out there for us. Some is just ignorance as you say but there the Haters are myriad.
We can elect a black man president, but we can’t have same sex marrigage? So much for equality…. My understanding is that 70% of the black voters in CA voted for proposition 8. Lets look back 50 years ago and remember when blacks legally could not marry whites, in fact just 41 years ago the U.S. Supreme Court said that Mildred Jeter, a black woman and Richard Loving, a white man, could marry. In order to change the law and allow such a marriage, the court relied on the fourteenth amendment. In writing the opinion for the court, Chief Justice Earl Warren said:
“This case presents a constitutional question never addressed by this Court: whether a statutory scheme adopted by the State of Virginia to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications violates the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. For reasons which seem to us to reflect the central meaning of those constitutional commands, we conclude that these statutes cannot stand consistently with the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Many of the states were outraged with this decision. The states wanted to protect the sanctity of marriage. The federal circuit court judge cited God in making his decision.
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
So much for equality!
Don’t kid yourself Ali, prop 8 definitely happened because of hate
We started off 17 points ahead and ended up behind because we let a Log Cabin Republican and other conservative white gays lead a campaign that lacked a consistent, emotionally compelling message. We had no presence in deep red areas like Obama did. We had no consistency like Obama did. And we did not reach people’s heart strings until the very last ads released too late. This campaign was mismanaged and the blame for losing should be put right on the No On 8 people. They messed up, and we progressives stupidly followed their shame based lead. And I hope no one simplifies this down to gay v black because we didn’t even have any queer black people at the top of our visible leadership, we didn’t do enough to educate and reach out and join hands. And that argument erases the many queer people of color in our community.