[lbo-talk] Why Blacks opposed Prop 8 -- and a simple way

Dennis Claxton ddclaxton at earthlink.net
Fri Nov 14 14:33:29 PST 2008


At 02:22 PM 11/14/2008, Dorene Cornwell wrote:


>if anyone
>had been paying attention, there could have been LOTS of angles to get at a
>different outcome.

Yup. And the reaction has been a little slow on the uptake too. Michael Pollak posted this the other day and it bears repeating I think:

<http://www.indegayforum.org/blog/show/31644.html>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



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