>>/ Three civil liberties groups announced this morning that they have /
>>/ filed a lawsuit asking the California Supreme Court to strike down /
>>/ state Proposition 8 if it passes. /
Doug wrote:
>Does this really make sense? The pro-choice movement never really built a movement - it was all about lobbying and litigation, punctuated by quadrennial pleas >to vote Dem because of the Supreme Fucking Court. With this passing with a 52-48 margin, and a lot of the opposition concentrated among older voters, >wouldn't it make more sense to organize rather than litigate?
I'm not sure that's true of the 'pro-choice' movement even in the recent past. (And, to be fair, 'pro-choice movement' would be analogous to 'gay marriage movement' in this context--a movement already reduced to a particular issue.) The efforts in South Dakota, for example, have been strictly grassroots, to keep abortion out of the courts, and with good success. Fear that the SD law would become a test case created more national urgency in defeating the anti-abortion measures there, both in 2006 and 2008.
The relationship between litigation and the Women's Liberation Movement in the earlier period is more complicated--but the movement's peak was clearly prior to the big legal reforms. The first New York abortion reform law was passed partly to void a class-action suit which some feared would result in the striking down of NY State abortion laws. That class-action suit came straight out of the WLM, but it was one of many tactics, and abortion was just one of the demands of the movement. That NY reform did remove some of the momentum towards total repeal, which was the movement demand at the time. The partial legal victory in Roe created a crisis of success and the accompanying loss of cohesion. That loss of cohesion (class-based, some of it) left room for the Hyde Amendment and Jimmy Fucking Carter to tell us life isn't fair.
I think the larger danger here is that the movement gets boiled down to one least-common-denominator legal issue, not that litigation becomes the major tactic.
Jenny Brown