My husband is a phone banking coach for the local No on 8 campaign. Tonight, at an update meeting, they confirmed a rumor that was circulating around the phone banking session last week: Yes on 8 supporters are calling members of gay and lesbian communities and telling them that if they support same-sex marriage, they should vote yes.
Again, for people in the back – anti-same-sex marriage people are telling people in same-sex couples to vote yes on 8. Their case is so weak that their strategy is now to just confuse people. Now, we don’t know how widespread it is, and obviously the Yes on 8 campaign would deny it if asked. But our campaign has received multiple reports from people saying they’ve been called.
The bad news is that now we have to divide our efforts between calling undecided voters and calling our own supporters to undo the damage. The good news is that we’ve raised enough money to expand our efforts.
Still, please, donate donate donate and volunteer volunteer volunteer. Have we mentioned yet that prop 8 is a constitutional amendment? Meaning that if it passes, it’s virtually impossible to reverse it?
And for California residents who may have gotten here through Google – if you support same-sex marriage, VOTE NO ON 8.
(Cross-posted on Modern Mitzvot.)
This is a long-standing tradition in California elections. Back when Prop 22 (the ban on same-sex marriage that was struck down by the courts in 2008 when same-sex marriage was made legal) was on the ballot in 2000, I remember hearing from all sorts of people that supporters of same-sex marriage should vote yes on 22.
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I will be voting No on 8. But if the worst happened, and Prop 8 passed, but then support for gay marriage continued to grow, would it be a simple ballot initiative to “undo” Prop 8? Is the process of removing clauses from the constitution the same difficulty as adding them?
And would anyone care to explain how on earth we came to have an equal protections clause in the constitution, supposedly to protect unpopular minorities from this kind of thing, while also giving the initiative process the power to change the constitution with a simple 50% vote? I hope someone sees the flaw in this, and that there’s an amendment in the future that stipulates some kind of change to this system.
I completely agree, Don, that we need an amendment to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future. I’m not sure how it would look, but this reeks of the kind of thing the equal protections clause was designed to prevent in the first place.
And while it is just as “easy” to remove a clause from the constitution as adding one, it’s much more difficult from the political perspective. It’s is far easier to prevent someone from taking away rights than it is to grant rights. Furthermore, the Yes on 8 base gets very active because they “fear” something bad (as false as that is), while much of the No on 8 base has the attitude of “I don’t care; let them do what they want. So while I’m there anyway, I’ll vote No.” Getting them to turn out to grant a right to same-sex marriage is much harder. Also, there are a lot of people who say “I’m against gay marriage, but I don’t want to take away a right that they already have.” As incoherent as that statement seems, it works in our favor.
The good news is that, in Massachusetts, the percentage in favor of gay marriage rises each and every year. Pro-equality legislators have been reelected, while anti-equality legislators are voted out of office. The issue is that this takes time to build support; and we don’t have time right now. If we get through this, we’ll be good for a long time to come in my opinion. But we have to get through this first.
Don, be careful what you wish for. You can theoretically set the bar for Constitutional amendments as high as you want, but it applies to all amendments, not just ones you don’t like.
So the high bar for the U.S. constitution will, for example, help prevent an anti-gay-marriage amendment from going through. But then again, the ERA got 35 states and would have passed if the bar was lower. And so on. Similarly, the California cutoff may make it easier to pass an antigay amendment now, but it will also make it easier to pass a progay amendment down the road whether or not prop 8 goes through.