Source: Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, Time, San Jose Mercury News, McClatchy Newspapers via Detroit Free Press, Reuters
Protests against Prop. 8 in California and, now throughout the country have been organized mostly through social networking sites without traditional "leaders". This is a flyer for a
Seattle protest scheduled for Saturday, Nov. 15 at Volunteer Park.
California's gay-rights movement has been beset by infighting and finger-pointing since the defeat of gay marriage at the ballot box, with some activists questioning the campaign's mild tactics, including the decision not to show same-sex couples in ads, Associated Press reports.
More than 10 million Americans in three states voted last week to deny marriage rights to gay people. With the addition of Florida, Arizona, and California, 30 states now have constitutional bans on same-sex marriage. In Arkansas, voters even approved a ballot measure intended to block adoptions by gay men and lesbians.
Nowhere did the gay rights movement suffer a more painful defeat than in California, the most populous and culturally influential state, where for the first time voters rescinded previously granted marriage rights.
Proposition 8, a measure to stop marriage equality in California, passed with 52 percent of the vote last week in a painful defeat for gay rights activists. The ban overrode a California Supreme Court ruling last spring that allowed 18,000 same-sex couples to tie the knot over the past four months.
And the professional movement leaders -- those who are tapped by reporters as "spokespersons" for a "movement" -- suffered a huge hit to their prestige.
LGBTQ 'leaders' criticized and ignored after stinging defeat for equality in California [contd.]
After the rejection of equal marriage rights had become obvious, street protests sprang up over the weekend throughout California. Protesters expressed anger and frustration at the vote, but few of the protests were organized by the professional activists who had waged the failed campaign against Prop. 8. Indeed, the street protests might have been aimed as much at the gay rights activists who failed in the campaign as they were at voters and churches who supported the ban.
Protests throughout the country are scheduled for this Saturday. Most are being organized through internet networks without input from professional LGBT activists.
The movement's leaders "were very timid. They were too soft," said Robin Tyler, a lesbian comic who created a series of celebrity public service announcements with the slogan "Stop the Hate, No on 8" that were rejected because they were deemed too negative. "We were lightweights on our side."
The national attention drawn to Proposition 8 -- reflected by the more than $9 million in campaign donations that flooded into California from other states over the past two weeks, a large majority to support the ban -- made the ballot measure there something of a national test of gay marriage, Mike Swift writes in an analysis of the loss for San Jose Mercury News.
After failure of the No-on-8 campaign, protest of Prop. 8 have also become national in scope.
Members of the LGBT community told Reuters they were hurt deeply and want to bring their civil rights argument -- that same-sex couples deserve the same treatment as others -- to a national audience.
"It took the rights being taken away from people to really get across that it's not a California issue. It's a nationwide issue," said Brandon Williamson, who was about to start his own protest website when he found jointheimpact website and joined forces as publicist.
Geoff Kors, executive director of the gay rights group Equality California, defended the choice of advertisements used by the No-on-8 campaign, Associated Press reports.
"Lesbian and gay people were everywhere in this campaign -- as spokespeople, on YouTube, our Web site. For the television advertising, the best messengers were the messengers that were used," he told AP.
But Michael Petrelis, a veteran AIDS activist in San Francisco, said the absence of gay couples in the media campaign was a fatal error.
"We were seen more as a liability," Petrelis said. "When you have that kind of attitude, it's no wonder there was little community buy-in."
But organizers of post-vote protests have mostly turned to internet communities without waiting for buy-in from professional activists.
In Long Beach, San Francisco, and throughout the state and even in Salt Lake City, most of the protests were not officially affiliated with any one organization. They were organized by volunteers, who posted the event on social network sites and passed out fliers.
The demonstrations across the state "are all pretty spontaneous," Jason Howe, a former spokesman for the No on 8 campaign, told Los Angeles Times. "This is all pretty grass-roots stuff. They're just going out on Facebook and MySpace and Craigslist. ... People are angry and frustrated."
Some gay rights leaders have encouraged the heated gatherings, while others worry they could backfire and offend churchgoers and others.
Evan Wolfson, executive director of New York-based Freedom to Marry, raised no objection to the protests but said it is important that they be carried out peacefully, AP reports.
"Peaceful protest is important, time-honored way of mobilizing people to action for justice," he said. "It's completely understandable that people would be expressing their sadness and determination."
In an email to its mailing list, the gay Christian activist group Soulforce urged readers to ignore "leaders" and follow the example set by individuals in California.
So, start organizing now. Don't wait on a LGBT rights group to take the lead. Most of the protests in California were organized by just a handful of people. You can do it too. Imagine the productive conversations around America's dinner tables if the evening news was flooded with coverage of peaceful marches in the other 29 states that ban marriage equality.
In the wake of our recent losses, let's rededicate our lives to speaking out with integrity and let's reclaim nonviolent direct action as part of that process. Let's understand that the vision of equality belongs to all of us and we are each responsible for taking direct action in pursuit of that dream.
The Prop. 8 vote in California has unleashed a hurricane of protest on the Internet, Reuters reports, with some supporters venting their anger and others planning national demonstrations.
Amy Balliett, 26, used her lunch break last Friday to start that website -- www.jointheimpact.com -- that calls for coordinated action across the United States this weekend.
In a few days, more than 1 million people have visited her site and dozens of marches and meetings are now planned for 1:30 pm EST on Saturday.
By the evening jointheimpact.com was created, it was visited 10,000 times, according to Reuters. By Sunday, there were 50,000 visits per hour and the computer running the site crashed. It has moved computers twice since in an effort to keep up.
Last week, the chief strategist for Proposition 8, Frank Schubert, said what was probably obvious to most of the protesters who took to the streets: the No-on-8 side ran a poor campaign.
"I think the story is we ran a far better campaign than the other side. I think we had 100,000 people that gave of their resources and their time" he said.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger -- who opposed the measure -- told CNN this weekend gay rights supporters were outmanned.
"They had a very strong campaign, the pro-proposition 8 people, and I think, they people who tried to defeat it and they did not have as good of a campaign or as much money behind it," Schwarzenegger told CNN's Late Edition.
Prop. 8's Schubert said same-sex marriage supporters had squandered big advantages in 2008 -- and not just in their failure to convince people of color to vote against the measure.
He pointed out that it's easier to convince voters to vote against an initiative than for one. The all-important ballot title written by Attorney General Jerry Brown cast the measure as one that would revoke a right, a move that had been viewed as particularly helpful to opponents.
"They had everything going for them," Shubert told the Mercury News. "They had a big Democratic turnout year. They had the skewed (ballot) language that it 'eliminates rights.' They had the advantage of a No vote. In the future they are going to have to campaign in favor of same-sex marriage as an affirmative policy of the state of California, that we should substitute same-sex marriage for traditional marriage. It's going to be enormously difficult for them to do."
The No-on-8 campaign squandered all its pre-election advantages.
The street protests could signal an emergence of a new activism to supplement or even supplant the established gay rights
In a teleconference last week among more than 100 gay legal scholars and others who support gay marriage, the mood was dour, Time reports. "This has cast a pall" over what had otherwise been a historic election on Nov. 4, said D'Arcy Kemnitz, executive director of the National Lesbian Gay Law Association.
Longtime gay rights advocate Dean Trantalis of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and others on the conference call expressed concern that the gay rights movement had become too focused on marriage, and is now paying the price in other more critical areas, Time reports.
"Marriage was never our issue," Trantalis said. "It was thrust upon us by the other side, and they've done a very good job of beating us up over it."
But professional activists may have lost some of their clout because of the stinging defeat represented by passage of Prop. 8.
Schubert said the best way to overturn the measure is not through the courts, but through another initiative on the ballot that would repeal it. But he doubts that will happen.
"Politically, this was the best chance they could have possibly had," Schubert said of the measure's opponents.
No on 8 leaders took some slight solace in noting that a lower percentage -- just 5 percent -- of voters had approved Prop. 8 compared to eight years ago when a statutory ban on marriage equality was adopted by a 22-point margin.
They blamed their loss on advertising "lies and distortions" from the Yes on 8 campaign, such as that young children would be required to learn about gay marriage in public schools.
The history of civil rights movements is full of setbacks, said Lorri Jean, chief executive of the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center and a member of the No on 8 executive committee.
"This is a temporary defeat," she said. "I don't have the slightest doubt in my mind that we ultimately will win the freedom to marry, and that it will be the law of the land in this country, not in just these few states."
But assurances like that from professional activists didn't do much to dampen the anger and frustration that led to large and peaceful demonstrations throughout California and elsewhere over the weekend.
Despite the serious losses in three states, the fight over gay marriage is not over in California, or anywhere else in the US.
Legal challenges, filed by the same groups that argued for marriage equality for a decade, are already asking the California Supreme Court to overturn the Nov. 4 statewide vote that made same-sex marriage in California not only illegal but unconstitutional.
Few of the protests against Prop. 8 have been strategic. They're not aimed at supporting the legal challenges or any other specific goal, but are simpler expressions of frustration.
But after the challenges make their way through the slow court process, the decision on them -- whatever it is -- is likely to spark even more protest.
"If the California Supreme Court were to issue a ruling that would invalidate the will of the people, the consequences for the court would be momentous," the Rev. Albert Mohler told TIME over the weekend.
Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and one of the nation's leading evangelical voices, called such a "usurpation" hard to fathom.
Imagine, Mohler said, how much more controversial Roe v. Wade would be now had the court issued the decision after more than half the states had held statewide elections on the issue. "Tuesday's rulings have made it much more costly for any court to reach a conclusion in favor of gay marriage," he said.
Schubert claimed the lawsuits seeking to overturn the ban have little chance.
"This is a Hail Mary, no question about it," said Schubert, manager of the Proposition 8 campaign.
Source: Criticism mounts among gays over Calif. ban | Associated Press
Proposition 8: Historic turning point, or just another battle in the culture wars? | San Jose Mercury News
Democratic legislators ask state Supreme Court to void Prop. 8 - Los Angeles Times
Gays, blacks divided on Proposition 8 | Los Angeles Times
Activists Rethink Their Gay-Marriage Tactics | Time
U.S. gay marriage fight takes to the Internet | Reuters