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I admit that lately I've been thinking more about clothes (and their symbolism) than issues, but in today's New York Times longtime religion reporter Laurie Goodstein writes about the various religious leaders descending on California in support of Proposition 8, a measure that would change the California Constitution to state "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California," and reading it, I was jolted right back into the fray.
Back in 2004, campaigns against gay marriage were nearly as central to the Republican strategy as the Swift Boat smears and the Neiman Marcus/Saks shopping-spree-style stories of the day—like John Kerry's ill-timed windsurfing trips.That year the 11 state ballot initiatives banning same-sex marriage—all of which passed—were widely believed to be a key element in Karl Rove's strategy for flushing out Evangelicals and right-wing Bush supporters to the polls. Dems panicked at the time and didn't fight them hard enough—if at all—leaving statewide activists stranded as they went door to door with a message of equality.
This year the issue hasn't gone away—in fact, California, Arkansas, and Florida all have ballot initiatives that would restrict the rights of gay men and lesbians—but it's certainly deeper underground, despite, or more likely, because of, changes in the right-to-marry that took place this year in California and Connecticut. But recently, the McCain-Palin ticket has tried to revive the issue, unleashing Sarah Palin to The 700 Club, where she announced support for a Federal Marriage Amendment (which Sen. McCain himself has said he does not support). Currently, polls put support for California's version of the discriminatory measure a shade less than 10 percentage points behind.
Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle gives a clue as to how the measure might be defeated this time: State Attorney Gen. Jerry Brown reworded the amendment to read "eliminates the right of same-sex couples to marry." With that wording, support for the measure immediately went down. Activists I spoke to in 2004 universally believed that a key to defeating the discriminatory measures were to find ways to convey to voters that this was a violation of their neighbor's rights—as opposed to the Evangelical and Republican positions that claimed gay marriage would undermine the marriages of straight voters. Those voters reached with the message that a ballot measure banning gay marriage was no better than creating a second-class citizenship—in other words, was inherently discriminatory—tended to vote no on the issue.
The big concern with California, and elsewhere, as Goodstein points out in the NYT, is that there tends to be a kind of Bradley Effect on gay issues: Voters are loathe to tell pollsters they plan to vote against their neighbor. But if Prop 8 is defeated, maybe Jerry Brown finally found out how to get that message across more broadly: Write the ballot truly explaining the amendment's intended impact, so voters are forced to face its intended bigotry.