Why Did Prop 8 Win?

“There’s no way Prop 8 will win in California. It’s the most liberal state in the U.S. Hollywood’s just crawling with gays. Plus, it’s a blue state that’ll totally vote for Obama. Anyone voting for a black guy advocating change will also vote for equal rights. If Prop 8 will lose anywhere, it’s in California.”
You might have heard variations of the above in the weeks leading up to Election Day 2008. Back then, the Yes and No to Prop 8’s sides muscled for money, and public opinion stayed about even. Despite the millions of dollars, numerous advertisements, and celebrity endorsements, Prop 8 ended up passing 52 to 48 percent, overturning a California Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage on May 15th, 2008. According to the court’s initial decision, marriage is a human right and the California Constitution prohibits denying anyone social equality. In fact, the current lawsuits filed against Proposition 8 on behalf of married gay couples cite the exact same argument.
Even though California’s government asserts that any already performed same-sex marriages are still legally recognized, some county clerks are confused when Prop 8actually goes into effect.
QueerClick ran several PSAs soliciting donations to No on 8,and also a comprehensive Weekender explaining both sides of the gay marriage argument. Ultimately, we made a case for the social benefits of gay marriage, namely on economic grounds (arguably the more persuasive argument in economic-minded America). Now after our defeat, we examine why Prop 8 won, what it says about America’s LGBT movement, and where we’ll go from here.

Openly gay statistician David Silver suggests that voters over 65 helped pass Prop 8, meaning that voting for Prop 8 occurred over age lines rather than racial lines. Gay essayist and activist Dan Savage agrees with Silver. Here, the handsome Mr. Savage takes on President of the Family Research Council, Tony Perkins. They are moderated by the silver fox, Anderson Cooper.
Let’s quickly dispel a racial myth about Prop 8’s victory, that blacks and Latinos overwhelmingly voted for the measure. It is true that 70% of black voters and 52% of Latino voters supported Prop 8. But one should also note that both communities are spread out all across California, meaning that black and Latino voters did not singlehandedly make the majority of any county in favor of the measure. In fact, blacks only make up 6.7 percent of California’s electorate while Latinos make up 14 percent.
The incorrect perception that “blacks and Latinos tipped the vote in favor of Prop 8” created an instant scapegoat that brought racial tensions in the LGBT community to the surface, tensions now being exploited by the likes of conservative pundit Bill O’ Reilly and Tony Perkins—president of the bigoted Family Research Council. It’s a divide-and-conquer strategy meant to pit two discriminated groups against one another instead of acknowledging the countless other groups who voted overwhelming in favor of Prop 8 by over 60 percent:

• The elderly (65+)
• Republicans
• Conservatives
• People who decided for whom to vote in October (but not within the week before the election)
• People who were contacted by the McCain campaign
• Protestants
• Catholics
• White Protestants
• Those who attend church weekly
• Married people
• People with children under 18
• Gun owners
• Bush voters
• Offshore drilling supporters
• People who are afraid of a terrorist attack
• People who thought their family finances were better now than 4 years ago
• Supporters of the war against Iraq
• People who didn’t care about the age of the candidates
• Anti-choicers
• People who are from the “Inland/Valley” region of California
• McCain voters

A memo from the LDS church dated March 4th, 1997 outlines President Gordon B. Hinkley’s strategy for dealing with gay marriage. The condescending Hinkley says, “We’re not anti-gay, we are pro-family… We love these people and try to work with them and help them. We know they have a problem, we want to help them solve that problem.” Ah… that explains the use of electroshock therapy to cure these well-loved abominations.
A strong backlash has been deservedly focused against the Utah-based Mormon Church which raised $22 million for Prop 8—70 percent of Yes on 8’s total income. According to a memo just made public, the church teamed up with Catholics to defeat gay marriage as early as 1997. They did this because the centuries-old Catholic Church is more established and accepted in America, whereas Joseph Smith founded the Mormon Church in 1830 and—if you agree with Louis from Angels in America—”Any religion that’s not at least two thousand years old is a cult.”
It’s understandable that these religious institutions should try to paint homosexuals as harmful to children considering their own troubled past with child-molesting priests, Mormon child-wives and the psychological torture of gay Mormons. But now, there’s an outcry to repeal the Mormon’s tax-exempt status citing a 1954 IRS tax code meant to curtail political endorsements from churches. However, the repeal effort sadly stems from an incorrect understanding of the tax code:

“The law for 501(c)3 non-profits—both religious and secular—is clear that issue advocacy and education is fine while candidate endorsement is prohibited. [The Mormon church’s donations to Yes on 8 fall under] issue advocacy/education, and thus [is] protected. I think it is offensive, wrong-headed, and problematic on many theological and political grounds, but constitutionally protected nonetheless.”

So U.S. tax law does in fact not stand in opposition to the Mormon and Catholic churches’ involvement here, and it seems unlikely that the IRS will ever strip the church of tax-exemption anyway, especially because Bush and Obama have both endorsed “faith-based” initiatives and church-led community service efforts. That and, religion has long had its hands in politics for—a few churches have even gone so far as to deliberately endorse a presidential candidate with no consequences whatsoever.
Recently, some have suggested boycotting the entire state of Utah. Even though the Mormon church does not have a heavy financial stake in either Utah’s ski slopes or the Sundance Film Festival, the reasoning goes that 60.7 percent of Utah is Mormon and by economically deserting the state, you’ll also punish the church.
But a majority of Utah’s Mormon population lives in the state’s rural areas outside of Salt Lake City and Park City (where Sundance is held). Salt Lake and Park City are the most liberal cities in the entire state and Sundance is a very pro-gay event that has a long history of supporting gay and lesbian filmmaking. Furthermore, a lot of Utah residents (some of them Mormon) vehemently disagree with the church’s role in Prop 8. Despite the church’s gigantic financial contribution, the residents of California are the ones who actually voted for Prop 8, so why not boycott California instead? The Mormon church and the Yes on 8 donors deserve to have a shameful light cast on them, but Utah’s just an easy scapegoat that misses the larger issue.

One of the most emotionally effective yet disturbing No on 8 ads, didn’t come from No on 8, but the Courage Campaign Issues Committee. One Catholic bishop called the ad “a blatant display of religious bigotry and intolerance.” We couldn’t agree more!
Hindsight is 20/20 and in the days immediately following the passage of Proposition 8, we’ve realized a handful of problems with No on 8’s organizational skills:
– A managerial top-down organizational structure in harsh contrast with the Obama campaign’s bottom-up grassroots style and structure—”I was amazed at the level of scripting: ‘don’t say ‘civil rights,’ don’t say ‘constitution,’ don’t say ‘gay.” I couldn’t believe it.”
– The LGBT community’s proactive rather than reactive response: “[Anti-gay groups] study us daily. They read our web pages and listen to our spokespersons in anticipation of getting an advantage that they can use against us. But mostly, they plan and strategize behind the scenes. And us? Some of us (please notice that I did not say all) wait until we are threatened by ballot initiatives before we mobilize and concentrate on the enemy. How many of you know the name of the so-called pro-family group in your area? Do you know their leader or the policy issues they are pursuing now or will pursue in the future?
– Tardy outreach to ethnic communities: “Andrea Shorter, a black lesbian volunteer for the No on 8 campaign, told me that the outreach to the African-American community began in earnest a week ago. “What’s happened is that there’s been an outcry from communities of color, including African-American communities, who say, ‘Include us!’ Now there’s a [Get Out The Vote] strategy, but for some it seems last minute,” she said in an interview before the election. Another No on 8 activist, Karin Wang, told me at the City Hall rally that when Asian Pacific Islander groups went to buy ads in Chinese and Korean newspapers, they were informed that Yes on 8 had been renting space for weeks.”
– The lack of gay people in any No on 8 TV ads: “A senior “No on 8” official told KPIX-TV in San Francisco that “from all the knowledge that we have and research that we have, (images of gays) are not the best images to move people.” Children, also, were missing; showing kids with same-sex parents could too easily backfire.” This is possibly the result of too many focus groups. But excluding gay people from No on 8 ads removed their most compelling emotional argument: that loving couples make good families deserving of legal protection. Their exclusion also implicitly agreed with Yes on 8’s assertion that gay people are unappetizing and worthy of exclusion.

It’s also important to clear up the misconceptions between civil unions and marriage because in America, they are separate but not so equal. Recently, UK-resident and A-gay Elton John said U.S. gays should be happy with civil unions, because using the word “marriage” is what gets all the Christian wingnuts up in arms. However, as Blue Jersey’s Think Equal campaign explains, what we’re actually after is “civil marriage” (with legal benefits), moreso than a religious one (with God’s blessing).
Often, LGBTs compare the gay rights movement with the American Civil Rights movement, a comparison that irks some:

“We are captivated by the visible aspect of this movement, i.e. the rallies, the marches, the speeches… but we need to reconcile ourselves to the fact that we are not nor will we ever be like that movement. Certainly there are similarities, but we get so entranced by what happened back then that we don’t seem to have perspective. [We need to] get away from the African-American civil rights movement terminology. Certainly we should use it as a blueprint but we should also be trying to establish our own style in fighting for our rights.”

It’s good to differentiate the two. Though LGBTs face wide-scale institutionalized homophobia, this is Stonewall 2.0 (or 4.0, depending on how you count), an era where we are social networking, mobilized nationwide protests as of this last week. While boycotts are a good start, phone banks, online ads, door-to-door canvassing, letters to the editor, and grassroots attention to local homophobes are an integral part of keeping gay rights in the national limelight.
Likewise, instead of waiting for gay celebrities to speak or donate or the Human Rights Campaign (who stayed mostly silent throughout the election), we need to seek out gay leaders in our own communities.

In Harvey Milk’s famous 1978 “Call to Action” speech, he calls on gays to activate, demonstrate and legislate—all equally important endeavors that give hope not only to contemporary and future gay Americans, but gay people everywhere. Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man ever elected to U.S. public office.
Obama’s election and the passage of Prop 8 made the morning of November 5th an ambivalent one for gay Americans. Obama’s election didn’t prove that America had matured beyond its racist origins—if anything, Obama’s election has brought those ages-old racist sentiments boiling to the surface. Moments after he was declared President-elect, the mostly-white newscasters finally acknowledged some positive contribution of blacks and Latinos to the U.S. campaign. Viewed side-by-side, Obama’s election and the passage of Proposition 8 aren’t endings, but the dawning recognitions of larger social inequalities. Just as blacks, Latinos,and Asians must fight for greater positive representation and voices in mainstream news and entertainment, so to must we gays fight for civil protection.
We must do it on our own terms—not those handed down by the civil rights movement or arguments framed by so-called “pro-family” groups—but with wit, style and verve. We need to speak truth to power, casting light on those who would seek to deny our children and loved ones financial and legal protection. It is the only way we can overcome the physical or emotional violence that we’ve been subjected to for years.
After this weekend of historic LGBT protests against Prop 8, we’re curious… what do you think individual LGBTs can do to help the gay rights movement at large?
(SMALL UPDATE: Here’s a parting shot… thanks for reading.)