Good As You

'The obvious truth is that our civil rights should never be put up to a majority vote.'

That's the comic part about it all (if you like your humour black as pitch). The anti-gay contingent appear to have confused 'democracy' with 'tyranny of the majority'.

As for what can be done, I have optimistic and pessimistic thoughts. The optimistic thought is that Jim Burroway over at Box Turtle Bulletin was right (http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/10/29/15808). Yes, that sounds depressing, but the key point is that if a mistake was made it can be corrected next time.

And oh, there'll be a next time alright...

The pessimistic view is that the time isn't right. It almost is; the Maine vote was a close one. But more work needs to be done long before there's a hint of anything coming up on the ballot. More publicity about what school curricula actually entail, more publicity about how Massachusetts hasn't yet sunk into the sea, and so on.
Every success in every area increases our chances.

That's not to say, of course, that the pro-gay Maine contingent should have just rolled over and died. That's not to say that the effort was wasted from the start. For one thing, you never know when the tipping point has come; for another, it almost got there. And even though it didn't, it showed what was really happening. It showed that the pro-gay contingent was far more alive and kicking than the fundamentalists would have liked.

What might give us some hope would be if there was a breakdown of votes by age group. Those usually show that the 65+ group votes FAR more against marriage equality than the younger generations. I know it sucks now, but in a few years, they'll all be dead and we can try again.

Maybe we are seeking the institution of marriage too soon. Who knows. But then again, time is with us, its just not moving quick enough. I personally believe that we should keep talking to people on why gay marriage is so important. Plus, I believe time and talking to people go hand-in-hand and that it will speed up the process of changing hearts and minds. With that, equality will prevail.

We did everything right. We just need to keep at it and always look for new and better ways to reach out to people. Let's find more supporters and then have another vote.

Don't give up.

The difference between Maine and Washington, 4%. only 4% cared that it wasnt about marriage. 96% had absolutely no reason to vote against it except to make life worse for gay people.

I give up on this country, 96% dont think I deserve the same rights as them. 96% dont even bother with the pretense that they're 'defending marriage'. Enkjoy wasting your time trying to fix this ****hole, I'll be moving to Canada and not having my rights put to vote.

I say this hoping that it never comes to this, but I have a feeling we need to find a way to exploit hatred and fear among straight people. That's NOM & Company's one and only weapon because it's the only one they need.

That is, *if* we keep working on popular votes. I think it's clear that that's a dead end; civil rights shouldn't be up for a majority vote.

And there's always the fact that God will continue to make gay babies, and the stork will continue drop them off in a lot of christian households. Slowly but surely I think love will gain more ground.

I've just about given up. Almost anytime gay rights are put to a public vote (notable exceptions being places like Kalamazoo!) we lose. I keep saying that next time, it's going to be different, next time we're going to do it even better, because we've learned from our mistakes. But we are at 31 states that have voted against us now, and I just don't think that's the truth.

A friend and I are working on putting together a ballot initiative for an amendment to the Colorado constitution banning divorce. We're hoping to get it on the ballot in 2011, because we know no one is going to get out and vote that year. We can use all of the same arguments, and underline it with, though we are not allowed to marry, we do wish to protect the sacred institution.

My only other option at this point is to find a fair sized island, find some financial backers and turn it into a self-sustained gay country. Because honestly, Canada's too cold.

What scares me about Maine is that every time a state does this, it reminds me that, as an immigrant whose native country has marriage equality, I am selling my rights every day for the sake of my career and my boyfriend.

Focus 100% of effort on the courts. That's the answer, basically.

The Box Turtle link doesn't seem to work, but apart from that, an article at Pam's House Blend asks why straight people could care about gay marriage at all - http://www.pamshouseblend.com/diary/13929/why-do-marijuana-dispensaries-win-and-gay-marriages-lose-on-the-same-ballot-in-maine

The marijuana vote had frail sick people basically imploring the people of Maine to not take away their sweet, soothing herb. Meanwhile, we have lezzies and homos smiling about how gay marriage rocks! No one cares. Show homos being discriminated against. Have horror stories. Show all the ways that we're second or third class citizens and get personal.

Yes, the Maine ads finally had gay people in them, but seriously, why should straight people at all vote FOR us, other than a sense of guilt or decency? And as far as I could tell, the grassroots organizing in Maine actually wasn't all that.

Here is where I am finding my staunch spine, Jeremy: Today I am remembering how much I love my man and knowing that people don't get to vote on our marriages. Strictly speaking, they are voting down my ability to include my marriage in the civil contract. Look witin today, folks. Find your marriage in the love, partnership, mutual support, integrity, and entertainment you get from your significant other rather than in the civil contract. Take a deep breath and build your strength... because we will indeed be back.

Well I *have* the civil contract and the unbreakable bond. But not gonna lie -- still having a very tough time with this one.

Once upon a time we ACTed Up.
Now we are very polite, begging for our rights and being outgunned by the Catholic and Mormon churches.

When we took on the churches directly we made progress.

Now they have no fear of backlash from the nice polite queers and they raise tons of money to fight us - it's that simple.

When we once again let them know that there are consequences to their religious persecution they won't be so anxious to attack us.

I believe some of the fault lies in how these measures are worded on the ballots. If people are not well informed on the issues on their ballots, and I am sure many are, it is easy to be confused knowing that voting "No" on a question is actually a vote FOR gay equality.

Watcher: according to a local blog 81% of voters from University of Maine voted NO. It's encouraging. On that note, the amount of support we received overall from the electorate would have been absolutely unthinkable 20 years ago! We WILL win - it can't be soon enough, I know.

There is a hidden story in last night's ME results. Given the high turnout, which rivaled that of a midyear election and the extraordinary ground effort by No on 1, how is it possible that we wound up losing areas like Augusta, which we won in 2005 by substantial margins? In every single town except one, we did worse last night than we did in 2005. Where we won, we won by thinner margins than in 2005. And where we lost, we lost by greater margins than in 2005. The overall effect was to turn a 2005 victory of 55-45 into a 53-47 loss, in spite of greater turnout. That does not happen by accident.

I think the untold story is the Yes on 1 ground game. The whole S4MM operation was very secretive. I did not read a single internal campaign leak over the course of 4 months. Their ground campaign is one giant black box. Schubert claimed to have 100,000 people on the ground in CA on Election Day 2008 - 5 volunteers for each of CA's 20,000 precincts. I saw no evidence of this in ME, but it is blindingly obvious that he had something on the ground in places like Augusta. Were these people quietly recruited from Catholic churches? Were they Mormons slipped into the state in the dead of night? I think when the facts come out, we will see that No on 1's ground game was matched and exceeded by S4MM.

Those who have power will never give a little of it up without a fight - and by fight, I don't mean pulling out "Acting Up" tactics.

But I do mean being in their face, not hiding, pursuing our relationships, running for office, getting involved in all aspects of our community, and not backing down.

We forget that marriage equality is a part of a larger fight for lgbt equality and we shouldn't be discouraged because there will be setbacks.

It's not SUPPOSED to be easy, folks.

The ONLY way this will happen is to refuse to let civil rights be voted on. Make the effort basically a marketing campaign to increase awareness to people. From what I saw, the Maine group did this very well. But don't make the vote itself the focus -- because even if we win, we lose by letting civil rights be put to a vote.

The vote is only the FIRST step in the process, and the issue needs to be settled in court.

Laws are made by the legislature and civil rights issues are resolved by courts when there is question as to whether laws conflict with rights. The executive (mayor, gov, president) then administers the laws. That is the way our government system is supposed to work.

Time is on our side. Trust in those gay babies, trust in love. I agree with you that No on 1 played well. Not well enough, clearly, but changing people's minds takes time.

Strength to you and your husband, Jeremy, and everyone who feels this loss. Slow and steady to the finish.

My thoughts on why we lost:

Two reasons mainly. First is targeting. I doubt Faux news ran many of the No on 1 side press releases refuting the lies that the mo-foes spread (in fact they were aiding in the spreading). Those with more conservative mindsets who rely on fox for their news were exposed to more lies than truth.

Second, while I love how the No on 1 sides adds showed us as we are, normal people trying to live out lives and raise our families, there was a decided lack of attack adds. We need to be assertive in going out there on the airwaves and telling people "you are being lied to."

Well we clearly need a continuous public education campaign in every state, regardless of the status of the laws in that state. Weaken their base. Play up both sides of the image - the horror stories of discriminatory laws AND the healthiness of our families and the success of our children.

We also need to extensive outreach to the rural and the poor. Those are the groups that we can reach. We might have some success with some religious groups, but there are plenty of non-religious people who are voting against us. Plenty of discriminated against people voting against us. Those are the groups that we can reasonably hope to reach IF we actually try.

We've pretty much saturated our support in mid- to mid-upper income urban communities. We're not going to get much more bang for the buck there.

And we still need to continue pressing our politicians, our media (for their stereotypical portrayals of GLBT), businesses and our high-profile opponents (revealing their indiscretions and weakening their credibility).

Jeremy I want to see exit polling from last nights election because I feel very strongly that they will vindicate the No on 1 campaign. Does anyone know if such statistics exist or are available?

I have to believe that No on 1's strategy worked, and that we scored better within certain demographics than we did in California last year, and that ultimately this was an election lost to the dominating turnout of older voters in an off-year election.

In other words, I'd want the next fight to be fought from the same playbook, simply with more resources and better timing.

'The flag that we have pledged allegiance to, does not pledge allegiance to us.'
'You've always told me, it takes time. It's taken my father's time. It's taken my mother's time. My uncles time, my brothers and sisters time. My nieces and my nephews time. How much time do you want for your 'progress'?
-James Baldwin

The prominent thoughts in my head this morning, in no particular order:

** I want the detailed numbers.

The campaign was reporting hopeful results in a number of cities/towns; so was it a rural/urban split? How much of a factor was age? And the point of knowing these numbers isn't retribution, it's understanding what groups weren't reached.

** Privilege

The assertion of privilege by Gallagher and Brown irked me greatly in this campaign cycle. Inverting the historical demeaning of gays for wanting so-called "special rights," they insisted that straight couples are "special" and deserve to be the sole owner of marriage's rights and privileges.

** Majority/minority

I long for a simple, well-honed MLK-style message about the majority/minority distinctions. Maybe it's not possible to develop as a motivator of the masses, but the LGBT population is unusual amidst many (not all) other minority groups in that its proportion is not going to multiply. The vast majority of humankind is destined to remain straight, and the comparatively tiny swath that is lgbt poses no threat.

** Conformity/liberty

I wish I had a clearer, stronger message about the fiber of American life being about folks insisting on personal liberty in the face of demands for conformity, and our history of embracing the resulting diversity.

** Kids in schools

Knowing without a doubt now that every civil rights campaign will have to battle back against "the gays are coming after our schoolkids" arguments, it would make sense to me to adjust the response.

My thought: Let's be more explicit about what kids will be exposed to in school.

Second-graders, at most, are going to learn that some of the peers have two moms or two dads. And, that's about as explicit as it's going to get. It will be no different from them learning that some of their peers go home to a mom and a grandparent, or a mix of parents and step-parents.

My gut says this needs to be well-developed, including video of classrooms, video of college instructors guiding future teachers, interviews with teachers. These hands-on materials need to demonstrate the attention and sensitivity that good teachers already devote to family, religious, and cultural diversity among their students.

When the NOM crowd squawks about what kids will be taught, they demean competent, professional teachers, implying that every chalkboard is a pulpit and every lesson is ideologically based. It seems to me that the counter-message by marriage equality proponents -- No, we don't want to change anything about education -- falls flat with many folks who already distrust teachers and public schools. Developing a thoughtful alternative seems critical to me.

"I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power."--Thomas Jefferson

The work continues...

Well, unless we can find a way to clone Jeremy Hooper, people like me, who til now have sat back upset but unmoving, will have to start doing something and investing time and effort. Thanks, Jeremy, and sorry for coming late to the work, but you've been instrumental in convincing me that I need to do what I can within my sphere of influence to persuade and convince others to stand for simple fairness.

I posted this once earlier, but it seems to have been lost in the ether.. somewhere.. Forgive me if it gets posted twice.

We have now seen two very different campaigns (California and Maine), and both of them failed. In California, I think that we operated on the principle that we were afraid to touch the third rail (we couldn't put our faces before the electorate because that makes them hate us more). In Maine, we grabbed that third rail and owned it (danced a jig on it, as my grandfather would have said).

In California we had virtually no ground effort, in Maine we were all about ground effort, and canvasing and getting the vote out. In California we were late to the money trough, in Maine we were there first and significantly out raised our opponents. In California we were very late in responding to the lies from the lying liars, in Maine, we were much more punctual in bringing it! All of those "differences" and we still were unsuccessful.

The hate-filled, homophobic, lying liars, on the other hand, ran with exactly the same strategy that they have effectively used against us time and time again on the marriage equality front. Their strategy is to ensure that voters are afraid, or angry, or full of hatred toward LGBTs. Interestingly, that strategy doesn't work as well when any of our other rights are up for a vote, just marriage. It is the only strategy that they have, and in seems to be consistently effective, but only on the issue of marriage equality (though it does still work once in a while on other issues in some areas).

So, maybe we need to ask ourselves what is fundamentally different about marriage, as it relates to our civil rights? Why does the population have little trepidation when enacting sweeping protections for some of our rights (not always, but in more and more of the cases), but is less "generous" with regard to marriage equality?

We all know that they really don't hold strong "mythically ebullient" or farcically idyllic notions about the "sanctity" of marriage. A large number of them are probably still stinging from the pangs of a former (or current) marriage-on-the-rocks. Maybe they compare their personal inter-spousal relationships with ours, and worry that we are actually better at it than they are? Or maybe they think that we are worse at it, and want to "protect" us from the dreaded "till death do you" part? Maybe they see no tangible benefit to marriage?? and a lot of tangible (pernicious??) anti-benefits to the same?

I thought I had a lot of answers after Prop H8... but now I seem to mostly have questions. The next time that we do this, though, I'm not going to go soft on the notion that we should fight fire with fire. In both CA and ME, we played "nice". Sickeningly sweet "NICE". The next time, maybe we should take the gloves off, and get as dirty as the lying liars are willing to do... I mean, really, what do we have to lose that we aren't losing every time we do this anyway?

What scares me is the Bradley effect between the polls and the actual vote. In Maine the polls were dead even but we lost by 6 points. In Washington, the polls had us up 10 and it looks like we barely won. It tell me we have farther to go than I originally thought we did. We need to see the demograghics change more before we can win a vote, need to wait until 2012 in California and Oregon even though some polls say we have a chance now. Focus on the courts and the state legislatures for now. Would be interesting in hearing thoughts on how Corzine's loss will impact marriage equality in New Jersey, will they pass something before he leaves office?

Ken... what strikes me is that Gallagher and Brown used passive-aggressive techniques to encourage the Bradley effect.

"Advanced warning, people," the NOM-folk advised conservatives, "If you identify with the rest of us in the anti-gay crowd, you will be vilified, lose your job, respect, customers, because you will be labeled a bigot."

I can only say that as a Christian living in Maine I am ashamed. I am ashamed that people who claim to be religious even though they never go to church and never open the book feel that they can discriminate and be powerful enough to take away the basic human rights of others. I am ashamed that the Yes on 1 campaign won. They're fighting to protect a holy sacrament when they disgrace it every day. When you get married it's a promise in front of God that you are going to love that person and stay with them in sickness and health, for better or for worse, till death do you part...Still 50% of marriages end in divorce. So wake up, folks, marriage is disgraced! Marriage is a covenant with God. Both of my parents bailed on me and I was raised by other relatives and I'm better for it. Some kids don't get that though, they get foster homes, and molested, and gang initiations. If two men, or two women have enough love in their home to prevent those things from happening to another child then GOD BLESS THEM!! Every life is a precious blessing. I look very much forward to voting for equality as many times as I have to until it sticks. These "Christians" need to remember a few of their lessons, including but not limited to "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God". When a scribe asked Jesus what commandments were most important he said, "The foremost is, 'Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.' "The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these." And last but not least "For ALL have sinned and come short of the glory of God." Everyone. Not just the LGBT crowd, the gangs, or whatever ethnic groups you wish to persecute next, even you church going bible thumpers are sinners. We're all sinners. These people need to stop being dictated to and actually READ THE BIBLE for themselves. It's pretty clear in red and white. I am sorry that the people of this state have denied the LGBT community basic human rights. I am ashamed to be a part of a community that is so hateful. I only hope that this strong community will continue on their quest and not give up until the next time we get to vote. Hopefully it will turn out better next time. I am sorry for the pain you feel for your loss. I had really hoped Mainers were a more understanding group than this. I will continue to follow the campaign and do what I can to open more minds to the obvious...that any two people who love eachother should be allowed the basic human rights of marriage. God bless you all.