First published at 365gay.com on October 17, 2008
If the election were held tomorrow, it’s quite likely that gays would lose marriage in California.
That’s California, our most populous state, home of San Francisco and Nancy Pelosi and the liberal Hollywood elite. What progressive California giveth, progressive California may taketh away.
It surprises (and frankly, depresses) me how few gay people know or care what’s happening. Here’s the quick version: in May, the California Supreme Court declared the state’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional. Prior to the decision, California had domestic partnership legislation granting nearly all of the statewide legal incidents of marriage. But the Court held that denying marriage to gay and lesbian couples deprived them of a fundamental right and constituted wrongful discrimination.
Gays began legally marrying in June, making California the second state (after Massachusetts) to support marriage equality.
Meanwhile, opponents collected enough signatures for a November ballot initiative to amend the constitution so that “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” (The amendment would leave domestic partnerships intact, but it would make it impossible for California to recognize same-sex marriages from Massachusetts or elsewhere.)
For several months we seemed poised to win. That changed in the last few weeks, with recent polls showing us losing 47-42%.
Why the shift? One reason is that we’re being out-fundraised and outspent, and the opposition’s advertising is effective. Recent figures posted by the Los Angeles Times show our opponents raising $26.1 million to our $21.8. A substantial chunk of the opposition’s money has come from out of state, 40% of it from Mormons.
You read that last line correctly: 40% of the financial support for one-man-one-woman marriage in California is coming from members of a church that little over a century ago was pro-polygamy (and still has many polygamist offshoots). 40% of the support is coming from a religious denomination that makes up less than 2% of the U.S. population.
What’s even more shocking are some of the individual reports about donors. The Sacramento Bee tells the story of Pam and Rick Patterson, who live with their five children in a modest three-bedroom home in Folsom. They withdrew $50,000 from their savings and donated it to Yes on 8. Pam says that it wasn’t an easy decision, “But it was a clear decision, one that had so much potential to benefit our children and their children.”
Or consider David Nielson, a retired insurance executive from Auburn. He and his wife Susan donated $35,000. They plan to forgo vacations for the next several years and make other sacrifices to cover their donation, “because some causes are worth fighting for.”
If I didn’t know better, I would think that California had just made same-sex marriage mandatory.
And this is what’s both baffling and frustrating. We gays have a direct and palpable stake in the outcome of this referendum. Yet few of us (myself included) are willing to make the kinds of sacrifices made by the Nielsons and the Pattersons—people whose marriage was, is, and will remain heterosexual regardless of what happens. They are free to choose so-called “traditional marriage” if it suits them. So what are they so afraid of?
I think the gay-rights movement’s failure to grapple with this question is another important reason why we may lose. We frame our arguments in terms of rights and liberty, forgetting that some people want the liberty to live without exposure to certain ways of life. They want a world where no one sees marriage for gays as an option—not their government, not their neighbors, and definitely not their children.
They want that world badly, badly enough to sacrifice for it.
In a democratic society, they are free to want that simpler world, and to spend money to get it, and to vote in favor of it. We are free to fight back. But that fight must include thoughtful responses to their concerns. It is not enough to assert our rights, especially when the documents embodying those rights can be amended by popular vote.
We need to make a positive moral case to our opponents. We need to show them that our lives are good, that our relationships are healthy, that our happiness is compatible with theirs. We need to show them that marriage is good for gays, and that what’s good for gays is good for society.
We need to tell them the story of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, the first same-sex couple to marry in California, a couple who were together for 56 years until Del Martin’s death in August at the age of 87. We need to tell them: these are the kind of people you are trying to take marriage away from.
I wouldn’t put my money on winning over the Pattersons and the Nielsons. But there are undecided voters who share their concerns—concerns about the world their children will inherit. We need to make the case to them. We need to raise money to communicate that case. And we need to do it fast.