On Wed, 5 Nov 2008, Doug Henwood wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Does this really make sense? ....Wouldn't it make more sense to organize
> rather than litigate?
[Jonathan Rauch, one of the original gay marriage boosters, wrote a post today along similar lines]
http://www.indegayforum.org/blog/show/31644.html
Try a Little Learning
November 6, 2008
Digesting the bitter Prop 8 news, I'm disappointed and sad to have
lost gay marriage in California. The adoption of a constitutional
ban there has set back the cause by years. What's more frustrating,
though, is what I'm hearing from people on our side. "This just
shows why civil rights shouldn't be put up for a vote." Or: "We lost
this one, but there are other courts to try." To me this translates
as: "We're determined not to learn from defeat."
Not just one defeat. On gay marriage, we're now zero for 30 on state
constitutional bans. Think about that. Has any other political
movement in the history of the United States compiled such an
unblemished record of total electoral annihilation? An introspective
movement should be doing some fundamental rethinking at this point.
My suggestion: Rethink, first, the wisdom of mindlessly pushing
lawsuits through the courts without adequately preparing the public.
The result is gay marriage in two states--one of which, Connecticut,
would soon have had it anyway--at the cost of a backlash which has
made the climb much steeper in dozens of other states, and which, in
some states, has banned even civil unions. The California debacle is
particularly stinging. We already had civil unions there, and we
were only one Democratic governor away from seeing those converted
legislatively, hence less controversially, to marriages. First rule
of politics: if you're winning anyway, don't kick it away.
Rethink, second, the strategy of telling the public that we're
entitled to marriage by right and that anyone who disagrees is a
discriminator or, by implication, a bigot. Some portion of the
public, let's call it a third, agrees with that proposition, but a
third isn't enough. As Dale Carpenter points out, another, let's
say, third loaths homosexuality, but they're not winnable. The key
is the middle group, people who oppose anti-gay discrimination but
see gender as part of the definition of marriage, not as a
discriminatory detail. We're going to have to persuade these people
that gay marriage is a good idea. We're going to have to talk about
gay marriage instead of changing the subject to discrimination.
Bludgeoning them with civil-rights rhetoric isn't going to work. Not
if it failed in the country's bluest state in a bright-blue year.
The gay marriage issue is not going to be decided over the heads of
the American people, and no amount of comparing it to Brown vs.
Board of Education or any other dubiously relevant precedent will
change that. Too many gay heads are too strategically locked into a
litigation-based mindset that has become counterproductive. Too many
people forget that Martin Luther King was a persuader, not a
litigator, and that the real breakthroughs came through Congress,
not courts.
by Jonathan Rauch