It’s the early morning on Tuesday, May 26, and 1,000 people are holding hands. They stand, confident, in front of the California state court house in San Francisco. They are waiting to hear a ruling from the judges inside, who will decide whether or not Proposition 8, the state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, is unconstitutional.
The amendment was approved by a 52 percent popular vote in the November 2008 election, and according to a summary prepared by the State Attorney General of California, the amendment officially provided that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized” by the state.
Through whispers and text messages, news of the ruling metastasized through the crowd. Upheld.
California officially became the first state in the nation to rescind same-sex marriage rights. Opponents of the amendment cried out, “shame on you!” to those who were in favor. Though the judges ruled in favor of the popular vote, the marriages that had already been given between July and November of 2008 were to be recognized and not annulled. At least, for some couples, including those in Colorado, there was certainty that their vows still had validity.
GLBT Support Centers in Colo. Face Reality of Decision
“This is a real battle,” said Andy Stoll, director of the Lambda Community Center of Fort Collins, Colorado.
Back in November, the Northern Colorado GLBTQ community, among others, felt the ripple coming out of California.
“I had a lot of folks who had gone to California to get married, and were really frustrated and mobilized around the issue,” Stoll said. This time around, however, the ruling didn’t affect Coloradans as much, being that it was state and not national legislation. He describes the Day of Decision call to action which served to show mobilization around the inequality that is out there, a consequence of the ruling as a necessary reminder for movement and involvement on a national scale.
“I think honestly that it acted as a catalyst for a lot of other folks to get involved,” Stoll said. “In November, people were just so taken aback about the fact that California did this.”
Kyle Pape, a senior Ethnic Studies major at Colorado State University, was out of the country when the amendment was voted in. Pape is self-identified as non-heterosexual.
“[The amendment] hit me personally as a deterrent to my humanity,” said Pape. “I was like, this dehumanization needs be approached… it is just blatant, institutional oppression.”
The Effects of Proposition 8 on the GLBT Community
“It actually serves to contribute to those acts of violence when you have state-sponsored discrimination of those folks,” said Stoll, “because it acts to dehumanize them and make it easier for people to treat them as less than human.”
Dehumanization begins when one side perceives another as threatening to their well-being or traditional values. According the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, every human being, regardless of any distinguishing characteristic, is “born free and equal in dignity and rights.”
The United States is sovereign in its own right, but the nation has made strides in working towards, what the Constitution delineates, as “equal protection of the laws” for all US citizens. This was demonstrated in the 1960s as the Civil Rights Act was passed to ensure the inability of employers to discriminate on the basis of age, race, sex, religion, or national heritage. Sexual orientation, however, is still an identity characteristic that has not been nationally protected.
“Equal protection of the laws” should amount to the inability to discriminate based on sexual orientation, race, nationality, religion, age, sex, physical ability, age, socio-economic status, education, and gender identification, Pape said. “The way that Proposition 8 is being perceived nationally is very much so tied to an individual sense of dignity within the GLBT community, and that is something very significant because it is a law that’s impacting how we think about ourselves.”
Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back?
“My feelings were that it would set us back 10 years,” said Joe Peterson, CSU student and co-director of Coloradoans For Family Equality. “Never in my wildest dreams would I think of people voting to take away rights.”
Despite this, many in the GLBT community feel that there have been small strides in progress, such as when President Obama officially signed the UN declaration decriminalizing homosexuality.
Before this, the U.S. was the only Western nation that had not signed it, due to Bush era administration fears that it would direct federal government to allow equal protections to people of sexual orientations other than heterosexual under the law. States within the U.S. still have sovereignty in this matter, and the results have been mixed. The Defense of Marriage Act, passed in 1996, allowed for a loophole in the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the US Constitution, meaning that states were not legally required to recognize same-sex marriages licensed in other states.
How big is this impact? According to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), the DOMA excludes gay and lesbian married couples from about 1,138 federal protections, rights and responsibilities bestowed upon licensed married couples.
In 2006, Colorado voted in its own amendment banning same-sex marriages.
Pape said that despite successes in mobilization, he sees a large amount of frustration and fervor within the movement due to the ruling of Proposition 8.
“People have the lack of ability to enact agency and have meaningful action that impacts the way their life is going,” said Pape. “What we have is this energy that isn’t being released by the people.”
Campaigning Strategies, Marginalization Thought as Influential Factor in Ruling
Between January and May of 2009, Pape researched and wrote a thesis on the effects of Proposition 8 on the GLBT community, including how and why it had passed. A large factor for the lack of success within the GLBT movement was possibly the differences in campaigning between the proponents and opponents of Prop 8, as well as with marginalization within the GLBT community.
What is recognized in the community is that the media campaign that the proponents of the amendment put out played a huge role in the results, partly due to the amount of money able to fund the campaign and the numbers of people that came out to vote.
“The money was all there for the opposition,” Pape said, “and they were very intelligent in that they were reaching out to so many different kinds of people, their information was in 14 different languages, and the GLBT movement’s was only in four.”
Funding is debatable, however.
“There is money on both sides,” said Peterson. He states that in 2006 in Colorado, the pro-Referendum I and the anti-Amendment 48 campaigns outspent their opponents four to one.
The other part of the issue, Pape said, is that the GLBT movement needs to reach out to all those who are suffering in oppression, not just this one marginalized identity. In this case, the church was able to reach out to many different people and, as Pape said, utilize their ideologies to mobilize the proponents of the amendment.
“Churches are really, really fantastic at organizing people,” said Stoll. “They can get a lot of people out there on whatever issue they are on, and we need to be better at countering that and utilizing some of their model… that’s something that we recognize as a strength in their group.”
This goes along the same vein as the Civil Rights Movement, said Pape. “[The church] is a mobilizing force.”
Media Influence and the Public Sphere
Despite the proponents’ heavy campaigning, the public also wasn’t seeing enough of how Proposition 8 was affecting the GLBT community, Peter Durth said. Durth is a Colorado State Alumnus and was the coordinator of TBGLAD, a week of awareness for under-represented and marginalized non-heterosexual populations, for two years at the university.
“Media outlets are so directed to specific audiences,” said Durth. “Anything about Prop 8 is preaching to the choir.”
The public was not getting enough of the images that we needed to see, said Durth. He compared the shortcomings of the GLBT movement’s campaigning to the successes of the Civil Rights Movement. Hear more about what Durth had to say on the issue… (as a warning, the file is large, I’m working on converting it to mp3).
Stoll said that the representation of the issue in mainstream media lies mostly in accord with whose ideology is being perpetrated through which conglomeration, with some main examples being Cable News Network (CNN), and Fox News.
Pape said, though, that it goes deeper than this. He said that the mainstream media’s representation of the GLBT community is not equal on the whole.
“It is in the interest of the media to appeal to the interest and perceptions of the public, which amount to the perpetuation of [fears and stereotypes] being incited to manipulate the public’s attention, and cause them to be afraid,” said Pape.
The Judges’ Decision
On whether or not the media had a significant affect on the California Supreme Court judges’ ruling on Tuesday, Pape can’t conclusively say. He wonders whether, in the context of their jobs, if they made the wrong decision or not in deciding to uphold the wishes of popular vote.
“The way they justify it, it looks like it may now go to a higher court,” said Pape. “If we get a federal ruling on our side, then we would get national change and that would be amazing.”
Peterson disagrees. He said that he is unsure of whether or not the lawyers who are taking the Prop 8 case to federal court has the support of GLBT legal advocates such as Lambda Legal.
“I hope it doesn’t go through the federal court because I do not think we have the precedent,” said Peterson. He said that the Supreme Court tends to be very conservative in how it makes change, and very slow in enacting these sorts of changes.
“What I hope it does is galvanize the community to become more active than we have been,” said Peterson.
The Next Steps for GLBT Equal Rights
Pape believes that the next steps for the GLBT movement are to begin connecting with all oppressed people, and that this will begin to connect the various movements of liberation into a singular fight.
“The GLBT identification is very unique in that it’s the only identity that is marginalized that also transcends all other identities of marginalization,” he said. “Really, we could mobilize very rationally with GLBT issues as one of the forefront leading catalysts connecting all the other fronts.”
Stoll said that the community centers around Colorado have been focusing more on what they can do to provide protections that are similar to those given in licensed marriages, without necessarily calling them marriages or civil union. This includes protections such as visitation and property rights, second parent adoptions, state employees having domestic partner benefits, and non-discrimination protections in the workplace.
“We are focusing… on all the things that happened since 2006 that are really positive, and getting people to understand that and getting them mobilized around it,” said Stoll.
Peterson, however, has been influential in drafting and proposing a new initiative in Colorado that will propose civil unions. After Proposition 8 had passed, he thought it would be the next best step that could be taken after the loss.
“This would be the first time we’d win partnership recognition through the initiative process, rather than going through the courts or legislature,” said Peterson.
“All of the places that have gone through legislature, like Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire, they had civil unions first,” he said, “so we believe this is a very good, achievable step forward.”
Only Iowa and Mass., which went through the courts, had no recognition beforehand, he said. Peterson said that a win in Focus on the Family’s home state would speak to the amount of strength the community is still building up.
“That’s what I hope we come away with as a community (from Proposition 8),” said Peterson. “Nothing can be taken for granted, and we must fight for everything we can.”
Where has marriage for lesbians and gays already been legalized?
in the mouth of god, all teeth are wisdom teeth 