December 31, 2008

“So, this New Year thing…”

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ACLU Files Suit to Stop Arkansas Adoption Ban

Good! It’s about time:

ACLU Taking Act One to Court

Just days before it’s scheduled to take effect, the ACLU files a lawsuit to strike down initiated act 1.

That act would ban unmarried couples who live together from adopting or fostering children.

The ACLU says it doesn’t matter if you’re single, married, gay, straight or co-habiting, every prospective foster or adoptive parent should be screened on a case by case basis. …

More at the link.

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You Might Think We’d Put “The Battle Over Gay Marriage” At Number One, But No — AU’s Got the Top Ten Spot-On

The role of religion in the presidential campaign tops the 2008 “Top Ten” list of top church-state stories, according to the editors of Church & State.

The monthly magazine, published by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, is the nation’s only news periodical devoted exclusively to the intersection of religion and government.

Said Church & State publisher Barry W. Lynn, “It was a wild and crazy year. To tell you the truth, I’m glad it’s coming to a close. I’m hopeful 2009 will be a lot better.”

After studying the past 12 months of news, the editors selected the following 10 stories as the most important and most interesting church-state developments for the year.

1. The Role of Religion in the Presidential Campaign: Not since 1960 when John F. Kennedy the first Roman Catholic president was elected, has religion played such a large role in a presidential campaign. News media representatives grilled candidates on what sins they had committed and what their favorite Bible verses were. Barack Obama fought false rumors that he is secretly a Muslim, and Mitt Romney’s Mormonism became a controversial topic. Candidates were held accountable for the incendiary comments of their pastors and their clergy supporters, such as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and TV preacher John Hagee. Many observers thought the whole thing was an unholy mess, especially in a nation that separates religion and government.

2. The Resurgence of the Religious Right: While pundits and progressives have proclaimed the demise of the Religious Right, the fundamentalist political movement remained extraordinarily powerful. Republican John McCain found it necessary to name evangelical Sarah Palin as his running mate to mollify the GOP’s restive religious base, and Religious Right forces rammed through bans on same-sex marriage in California, Florida and Arizona. Moderate evangelical Richard Cizik was forced out as government affairs representative at the National Association of Evangelicals after coming under fire from Religious Right forces.

3. The Battle Over Gay Marriage: Bans on same-sex marriage were approved in California, Florida and Arizona with conservative religious forces leading the drive. California’s approval of Proposition 8, with massive funding from members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was particularly contentious. The Mormons, joined by the Roman Catholic hierarchy and evangelical Protestant congregations, were successful in passing a constitutional amendment that takes away the right of same-sex couples to marry and reflects church doctrine in civil law. The issue now moves back to the state Supreme Court.

4. The Ascendancy of Rick Warren: Once known primarily as a mega-church pastor and best-selling author (The Purpose Driven Life), the Rev. Rick Warren has rapidly moved into position as the nation’s most prominent preacher, despite right-wing views on reproductive freedom, gay rights and church-state separation. Warren, a Southern Baptist who heads Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., is viewed by progressives as Jerry Falwell in a Hawaiian shirt with an ace PR team. After hosting a presidential debate stacked toward John McCain and being asked to give the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration, many think Warren seems destined to be the new Billy Graham.

5. Religious Right Influence at Justice Department: Religious Right influence at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) was exposed this year. According to an internal DOJ investigation reported in the media in July, senior aides in the department used religious and political criteria to hire staff members for non-political positions. Monica Goodling, a top adviser to the attorney general, checked to see if job applicants were “pro-God in public life” and held right-wing views on abortion, homosexuality and other issues. (Goodling is a graduate of TV preacher Pat Robertson’s Regent University.) DOJ also posted a legally dubious memorandum this year insisting that the federal government may give grants to “faith-based” social service agencies that discriminate in hiring, even if Congress has explicitly banned such bias.

6. Battles Over Creationism in Public Schools: New battles have erupted over the teaching of evolution in public schools. Blocked by the courts from teaching fundamentalist religious concepts directly in biology classes, Religious Right forces are trying a backdoor strategy. They are demanding that schools teach the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution, a euphemism for creationist ideas. Over the heated objections of educators, scientists and civil liberties activists, the Louisiana legislature approved an “academic freedom” law encouraging such instruction in the state’s schools. Now the Texas State Board of Education is debating a similar proposal as part of its 10-year review of science standards.

7. Church Politicking Plot: The Religious Right’s dream of building a fundamentalist church-based political machine took a big step forward in 2008 when more than 30 pastors used their pulpits to endorse Republican political candidates. They acted at the behest of the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a wealthy Religious Right legal outfit that wants to challenge the federal tax law ban on partisan politicking by tax-exempt groups. The ADF, which was founded by TV preachers and other religious broadcasters, hopes the Internal Revenue Service will revoke participating churches’ tax exemptions leading to a court showdown.

8. Defeat of Jeb Bush Referenda: Florida Gov. Jeb Bush saw his school voucher subsidies for religious and other private schools overturned by the state Supreme Court in 2006. Undeterred, the now former governor’s allies on an obscure tax commission engineered two measures onto the November 2008 ballot that would have repealed the state constitution’s ban on public funding of religion as well as diluted its provision for a strong system of public schools. To Bush’s dismay, the state Supreme Court on Sept. 3 struck the referenda from the ballot, derailing the scheme.

9. Blocking of ‘Christian’ License Plate: The South Carolina legislature unanimously approved a special “Christian” license plate featuring a bright yellow cross, a stained-glass church window and the words “I Believe.” Backed by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, four local clergy and two minority faith groups challenged the government favoritism toward one faith. On Dec. 11, a federal district court blocked issuance of the plates. The judge’s action may forestall similar sectarian plates under consideration in other states.

10. The Christmas Wars: It has become an annual holiday tradition Religious Right groups and their allies in the right-wing media launch a yearly crusade to stop the alleged secularization of Christmas and to pressure government to include Christian symbols in the holiday mix. They rail against stores’ use of the term “Happy Holidays” and insist that advertisements say “Merry Christmas” instead. This year, much of the attention focused on a Washington State battle where an atheist Winter Solstice sign was positioned near a Christian Nativity scene in the state capital. Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly and an array of Religious Right scolds lambasted Gov. Christine Gregoire for allowing the anti-religious sentiment. Ironically, credit for the atheist display actually should go to the Alliance Defense Fund, a Religious Right legal group that sued Gregoire last year, insisting that the Capitol is an open forum where a Nativity scene (and all other forms of speech) must be allowed.

Americans United is a religious liberty watchdog group based in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1947, the organization educates Americans about the importance of church-state separation in safeguarding religious freedom. Americans Unitied for Separation of Church and State Links: Homepage; Americans United (Press Center); Americans United (Action Center)

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Why is Arizona Allowing Proposition 102 Backers to Sidestep State Election Contribution Rules?

It was very tempting to title this: “So, Who’s Got Joe Kanefield’s Nuts in a Vice?” Or: “Is Joe Kanefield Just Another Anti-Gay Running Arizona Elections?” but that might suggest there’s something corrupt about Arizona’s “top election official,” and we don’t want to make anybody think such a thing. We certainly don’t think such a thing. In fact, we are 150% certain that Joe Kanefield is an honest, hardworking public servant who does his job with complete integrity. So, don’t you get the idea that there’s anything underhanded going on here. And if you think such a thing, you sure didn’t get that idea from us. Nossirree.

Backers of gay marriage ban did not properly fill out campaign donor list

PHOENIX — The backers of the successful ballot proposal to constitutionally ban gay marriage did not get the occupations of the majority of those who contributed to the campaign despite a state law requiring them to gather that information.

But the state’s top election official said Monday that the wording of the law allows them to get away with that. Joe Kanefield said they do not have to give back the donations that came without the required information or even to pay a fine.

A review of the public reports filed by the Yes for Marriage campaign shows occupations listed for only about one out of five contributors. The campaign managed to collect more than $7.7 million, mostly from individuals identified only by name and address.

By contrast, Arizona Together, the committee that collected nearly $750,000 for the campaign against Proposition 102, has occupations listed for virtually all of its contributors. …

Kanefield, the state elections director, said the law does require campaigns to get the information on occupations. And Kanefield said that, based on Frazier’s complaint, he sent a letter to John LeSueur, treasurer of the Yes for Marriage campaign asking for an explanation.

The response came in the form of several hundred pages of affidavits saying the information had been requested from the donors. …

On the bottom of each letter was a note, in small type, saying that if the contributor did not provide information about occupation, he or she “may do so” by sending an e-mail to a campaign address.

LeSueur did not return several calls seeking comment. But the committee never filed an amended report adding even a single address. Despite that, Kanefield said they are now in compliance with the law.

That law, he said, only requires a campaign to make its “best effort” to get the missing information. Kanefield said even the boilerplate language at the bottom of the acknowledgement of the donation meets that legal description. …

More at the link.

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ACTION, Santa Rosa, CA: Speak Up for California’s First Licensed LGBTQ Senior Care Community

Via email:

Save the Date: Support our LGBTQ Senior Community on Feb. 3rd

Fountaingrove Lodge, California’s first LGBTQ Senior Community, needs your help! Please mark your calendar to attend this meeting in support of its construction, which has been stagnated by opposing neighbors.

February 3, 2008 3:30PM
Santa Rosa City Council Meeting
90 Santa Rosa Avenue, Santa Rosa, CA

More information: www.fountaingrovelodge.com…

At risk: The first licensed LGBTQ senior care community in California.

The issue: The homeowners’ association in this high-priced area of Santa Rosa doesn’t want this type of development. Make them hear us. Stop the delays! Help show the City Council that further delay is unconscionable and without justification.

Even if you can’t attend, you should check out the Web site for this planned community — it’s very impressive.

… The creation of the Fountaingrove Lodge is literally the beginning of a dream come true. No place like this has ever existed before. Here LGBT elders will come together, live with pride, celebrate their unique culture and strength while continuing to share their storehouse of knowledge. …

Floor plans range from 900 to 2,600 square feet, with the choice of individual cottages, apartments in the main lodge, or flats.

An on-site Care Center assures provision for “aging in place” should full assisted living services be required, or the special “Life’s Neighborhood” program developed by Aegis to nourish and support residents with Alzheimer’s or dementia.

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Is Homewrecking a New Aggie Tradition?

Good question. The Aggie Insurgency (”Aggie,” FYI, is the nickname for any sports team, or team member, or, I’d guess, sports fan, at Texas A&M University) illustrates something I’ve been thinking about for some time: that the best exposés of anti-equality bigots are done by the bigots’ own homies. (I know that after our Prop 8 database is launched, in alpha, and I go to work on filling in details, I’ll naturally be drawn first to the bigots in my own backyard — such as my hometown’s ex-mayor, whom I took on directly at a city council meeting, who could not be swayed to acknowledge a Gay Pride Day requested by my old high school… despite being reminded that institutionalized homophobia led to the well-known and bloody suicide of Stuart Matis right on the steps of the ex-mayor’s own Mormon temple. But I digress, as usual.)

Aggies Do Not Lie, Cheat nor Steal, but Breaking Up Other Aggies’ Marriages is Apparently an Honorable Endeavor: Prop. 8’s Long and Intrusive Reach to Texas A&M, Part 1

Jeffery Puryear and Clair Nixon form the Aggie archetype. Both earned degrees from Texas A&M and both returned to their alma mater to contribute to its academic mission. Each is devoted to his family, work, and church, owns his own house and pays taxes—conforming in every way to the image that Texas A&M markets regarding the solid citizenship and family devotion practiced by Aggies worldwide. …

Although breaking up another Aggie’s marriage is definitely not an activity encouraged by the Aggie Code of Honor, it’s precisely what Puryear and Nixon—and arguably many conservative Aggies—would like to do with regard to these two one-time classmates and dedicated Texas A&M employees.

Is Homewrecking a New Aggie Tradition?

Jeffery Puryear (B.S. ’78) will earn slightly more than twenty thousand dollars this year as a part-time laboratory associate for the University’s Department of Ecosystem Science and Management. … Despite [financial hardships], Puryear recently scraped together a one thousand dollar donation to Yes on 8, a political action committee opposed to gay marriage in California.

Clair Nixon (M.S. ’77, Ph.D. ’80), a professor of accounting in the Mays Business School, stands on the other side of Texas A&M’s salary structure. However, he also faces his share of financial challenges. As a temple recommend-holding member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Nixon tithes ten percent of both his annual $157,137 salary and any ancillary income he earns through private consulting. A devout Mormon who has served as bishop of a local “ward” (congregation), Nixon takes seriously the Old Testament admonition to multiply and replenish the earth. He and his wife Laura have ten children.

Yet, when Mormon “prophet, seer, and revelator,” Thomas S. Monson, issued a mobilization order against the California Supreme Court’s legalization of gay marriage last spring, Dr. Nixon managed to find three thousand dollars to fund the same PAC that successfully urged 52% of Californians to deny gay marriage rights in the Nov. 4 election. …

The New Texas Philanthropy: Keep Gay Californians from Marrying

Altogether, conservative Texans donated $1.35 million to keep marriage in California between “one man and one woman,” included Mormon Alan Stock, owner of some 350 Cinemark theaters.* The Plano-based movie magnate gave $10,000 to Yes on 8, despite the fact that his cinemas are currently profiting from showing Milk, in which Sean Penn plays gay rights hero Harvey Milk, San Francisco’s legendary city supervisor and “Mayor of Castro Street,” who became America’s first openly gay elected official in the 1970s. …

More at the link, and worth the read — with Part 2 to come: “Two gay Aggies recount the joy of their California wedding and their disappointment at the passage of Proposition 8.”
 
* More on Alan Stock and Cinemark:

SF MovieBears: Boycott Century, CinéArts, Tinseltown Theater Chains
November 13, 2008

No “Milk” For Cinemark: “If You Have A Choice, Go Somewhere Else”
November 17, 2008

Meet Cinemark’s Token Auntie Tom, Bob Shimmin
November 23, 2008

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Judge Gives Green Light to Discrimination Suit in Ocean Grove Case

Backstory:

Ocean Grove Methodists Lose Tax-Exempt Status, September 21, 2007

The news is good — although the Anti-Gays will (as they have all along) twist this into: “See?! We told you gays want to force churches to marry them!” Never mind that 1) this has nothing to do with any church marriage, and 2) Ocean Grove Camp opened itself up to the lawsuit by denying its facilities after allowing the general public to use them.

Finally, notice that Ocean Grove Camp finally stopped renting its facilities to the public — which only reiterates the point we’ve been making all along, particularly in “Six Big Lies“:

If the facilities are “open to the public,” then yes, the owner could be sued for refusing to allow access to same-sex couples — or anyone else for that matter.

A Press-Enterprise article from late July … sums it up:

David Cruz, a professor of law at USC, an expert on sexual-orientation law and president of the International Lesbian and Gay Law Association, said religious institutions might be required to allow their meeting rooms or halls to be used for same-sex weddings if the religious groups already rent their facilities to the public. There has never been a court ruling on the matter, so the law is unclear, he said.

If a court does rule there is a requirement, it would be based upon long-standing state law that prohibits public-accommodations discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, not on the Supreme Court’s marriage ruling, he said. A religious group that does not rent out its facilities to the public would not be affected, because the facilities would not be considered “public accommodations,” he said.

The solution: Don’t rent your church hall to the public.

And now to the good news:

Civil Union Ceremony Victory
in Jersey’s Ocean Grove

The New Jersey Division of Civil Rights has handed a preliminary victory to a lesbian couple denied access to the Boardwalk Pavilion in Ocean Grove, which is owned by a religious group, the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, but a second lesbian couple was denied the same ruling because by the time they applied to use the space the association had stopped renting it out for private ceremonies.

Still, the favorable ruling, issued on December 29, suggests the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination may prove effective in ensuring the access of civil union couples to public accommodations within the state.

J. Frank Vespa-Papaleo, director of the New Jersey Division of Civil Rights, issued a Finding of Probable Cause on December 29, concluding the division’s investigation of a complaint filed by Harriet Bernstein and Luisa Paster. The couple had raised a public accommodations discrimination complaint against the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association after they were denied the right to rent the Boardwalk Pavilion for their civil union ceremony. The case now goes to a public hearing, at which an administrative judge will determine whether the anti-discrimination law has been violated and, if so, order a remedy on the couple’s behalf.

In addition to banning sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination, New Jersey state law specifically forbids discrimination against civil union couples by entities that provide goods and services to the public. The investigation showed that until this controversy arose, the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, which owns all the land in the Atlantic coastal town of Ocean Grove, near Asbury Park, had allowed couples to rent the Boardwalk Pavilion for wedding ceremonies, without regard to religious affiliation. …

More at the link.

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No On 8 Legalities Making Our Heads Spin, Too

Mike Petrelis has an update on the issue of the No On 8 campaign’s incorporation:

Toni Broaddus, the executive director of the Equality Federation of state gay rights orgs, sent me this great explanation about the structure and legal entities involved for the No on 8/Equality for All committee and other advocacy groups. I am most appreciative of her assistance in helping me understand how the No on 8 campaign was established and will speak with her shorty for more info.

The bottom line is this: I want to see all public documents that were filed, either with the CA Secretary of State or the Attorney General’s office or the Fair Political Practices Commission, that legal set up the No on 8 committee.

Of course, it would be so simple for Geoff Kors and the committee to start being transparent and provide the community on the EQCA web site with all the legal papers, and names of officers, for the No on 8 campaign. Think we can convince Kors and company to do this?

I have to agree with Broaddus’ assertion that this info will make my head spin. But head spinning is the least of our worries as we continue to demand accountability and answers from Kors and the No on 8 leaders.

Here’s Broaddus’ email…

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Video: Are Mormons Christians? Tom Minnery Says Mitt Romney Says They’re Not

Did Mitt Romney really say it? No matter — Tom Minnery, James Dobson’s radio sidekick, says he did. Which only reaffirms the thing that always gets many magic underpants into a terrible twist: The fundy-gelicals who sweet-talked the Mormons into doing their anti-gay bidding have never thought Mormons are Christians — only useful idiots. Of course, you knew that. We knew that. In fact, everybody knew that — except the Mormons themselves, who just can’t accept the truth that they’ve been had.

Chino found this enlightening 19 seconds of video:

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December 30, 2008

Mormon Lesson of the Day: How the Threat of Losing Tax-Exempt Status Resulted in a Sudden, New “Revelation” About African-Americans

A fascinating little history lesson — and one both the Mormon church and equal-rights advocates would do well to heed — by Dave Zirin, author of A People’s History of Sports in the United States: From Bull-Baiting to Barry Bonds:

Latter Day Protest? Proposition 8 and Sports

As supporters of Gay Marriage have discovered, it’s never easy to be on the Mormon Church’s enemies list. The Church of Latter Day Saints backed the anti-Gay Marriage Proposition 8 in California with out-of-state funds, and gave the right a heartbreaking victory this past election cycle. But the Mormon Church has been challenged in the past. Just ask Bob Beamon.

If you know Beamon’s name it’s almost certainly because he won the long jump gold medal in legendary fashion at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. …

But you may not know that Beamon almost never made it to Mexico City. Along with eight other teammates, Beamon had his track and field scholarship revoked from the University of Texas at El Paso, the previous year. They had refused to compete against Brigham Young University. Beamon and his teammates were protesting the racist practices of the Mormon Church, and their coach at UTEP, Wayne Vanderburge, made them pay the ultimate price.

They weren’t alone. …

On June 6th, 1978, as teams were refusing road trips to Utah with greater frequency, and the IRS started to make noises about revoking the church’s holy tax-free status, a new revelation came to the Book of Mormon.

Whether a cynical ploy to avoid the taxman or a coincidence touched by God, the results were the same: Black people were now human in the eyes of the Church. African Americans were no longer, as Brigham Young himself once put it, “uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable, and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind.” The IRS was assuaged, the athletic contests continued, and the church entered a period of remarkable growth. …

Hit the link for the rest — it’s a quite satisfying read.

When you’re done, ask yourself if the anti-gay hysterics screaming about Prop 8 boycotts would hurl the same insults (and downright lies) at Beamon and all the other athletes who stood up against the Mormon church for its racism.

And when the Mormons, or their fair-weather defenders, start screaming that the “real” goal of the marriage equality movement is to restrict religious freedom, or at least strip churches of their tax-exempt status, or simply destroy religion altogether (all common arguments from the reality-impaired world of the religiously insane), tell them the story of Bob Beamon — and remind them that the Mormon church never lost its “right” to discriminate against blacks, or continue preaching any hateful thing it wanted (such as Brigham Young’s declaration that blacks were “uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable, and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind”).

No, the church never lost any right to practice its religious bigotry as it saw fit — it only lost the privilege of practicing the kind of discrimination that is unequivocally illegal in the public sector, on the taxpayer’s dime.

And that’s when Mormon grand poobah Spencer W. Kimball suddenly experienced the “revelation” that blacks were equal to the white man. (Was Brigham Young wrong? Or did God suddenly change His mind about the race He purposely created as “inferior”? These are questions no Mormon can answer directly, although many will expend extraordinary efforts to talk around the issue in the apparent hope that the old saying is true: “If you can’t dazzle ‘em with brilliance, baffle ‘em with bullshit.”)

Funny how that works: The threat of losing something the church wants very, very badly — such as statehood — inevitably leads to a new “revelation” that changes the whole game, and leaves the faithful scrambling to come up with excuses for their god’s unpredictable caprice.

Below is a story from one of my favorite books, Zen Flesh Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings.

Zen Flesh Zen Bones was recommended to me when I was 19 years old, by one of those people who appear in your life briefly, and then vanish without a trace — and leave you wondering why you invested any energy at all into a relationship that was not only obviously destined to be transient, but was ultimately unsatisfactory.

Well, that’s how I saw it when I was 19. And when I was 19, and thought I knew everything, I cracked open the slim volume and began to read. And I didn’t understand any of it. “The sound of one hand clapping”? What kind of idiocy was that? And why don’t any of the stories in the book have a point — or, in lieu of a point, so much as an ending?

Nearly twenty years would pass before I plucked Zen Flesh Zen Bones out of its spot amidst the other several thousand books on my shelves and read it again. This time, I got it. All of it. The stories moved me — to laughter, to tears, to periods of brooding introspection from which I emerged clearer and calmer.

Was I suddenly enlightened? No. More open to enlightenment, certainly, but I will never expect to be enlightened. That defeats the whole purpose of enlightenment, you see — striving for enlightenment, or even expecting it. What is is, you know, and when you exist in complete harmony with what is, no matter what is, then you’re there.

Me, I’m way too flawed to even dream of achieving that state of consciousness (see? enlightenment is not something to be “achieved”), but I get the concept, completely. Just like I finally “got” Zen Flesh Zen Bones.

So, here is my favorite story from Zen Flesh Zen Bones — and anyone who has to ask why I’m including it here… well, if you have to ask, then you probably won’t care much for the story, either (although I can almost guarantee you will remember it for the rest of your life). If it doesn’t make sense, come on back in twenty years or so, and it will:

Three Days More

Suiwo, the disciple of Hakuin, was a good teacher. During one summer seclusion period, a pupil came to him frim a southern island of Japan.

Suiwo gave him the problem: “Hear the sound of one hand.”

The pupil remained three years but could not pass this test. One night he came in tears to Suiwo. “I must return south in shame and embarrassment,” he said, “for I cannot solve my problem.”

“Wait one more week and meditate constantly,” advised Suiwo. Still, no enlightenment came to the pupil. “Try for another week,” said Suiwo. The pupil obeyed, but in vain.

“Still another week.” Yet this was of no avail. In despair the student begged to be released, but Suiwo requested another meditation of five days. They were without result. Then he said: “Meditate for three days longer, then if you fail to attain enlightenment, you had better kill yourself.”

On the second day the pupil was enlightened.

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“A very valuable lesson about the separation of church and state”

rAmen to this LTTE from Washington state:

State capitol made a bad choice

First, a statue of Jesus. Then, an anti-religious solstice sign. And now, we might have a display honoring the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a sign from Kansas bigot Fred Phelps that Santa will send you to hell, and a display for Festivus, a joke holiday.

It’s a joke all right. Gov. Chris Gregoire and the Department of General Administration have learned a very valuable lesson about the separation of church and state, courtesy of the gutsy Freedom From Religion Foundation. The state had the option of either keeping our government property free of religious displays or allowing every display under the sun and turning our state Capitol building into a circus. Our state government has now learned that it made the wrong choice.

I can only hope that other state and local governments across the country, having witnessed this embarrassment on national TV, will vicariously learn the same lesson.

Moral of the story: If you want to look at a plastic baby Jesus, read about the winter solstice, dance around a Festivus Pole or raise a noodle to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, you can do so in the comfort of your home and/or your local house of worship. Thus, you can celebrate your holiday as you wish, and no one has to look at nonsense in the Capitol. A win-win for all, and for all a goodnight.

Matthew J. Barry
Issaquah

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December 29, 2008

Petrelis Raises Disturbing Questions About No On 8 Campaign

I’m still trying to digest this. I don’t like what my gut is telling me, but I’m not going to go with that and splay aforementioned gut all over the place, because I could be totally jumping to conclusions.

Suffice to say: Among the precious few bloggers (besides my wife) whose word I trust without question is Mike Petrelis. And what Mike’s been digging up about the “official” No On 8 campaign raises far more questions than it answers.

See if you can make sense of what’s really going on.

Could be something. Could be nothing. But, as my wife responded to my question, “What if we… got took?“:

“I hope not. But at this point, I wouldn’t put anything past anyone.”

Call me Tinfoil Hattie if you must, but we’ve been farked up the wahoo so many times… and so much about this just does not add up — not least of which: If Kors, the face of ECQA, doesn’t know the score…

…or, worse yet, if Kors does know the score, and yet…

Oh, hell, just read it, and see what you think:

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If You Never Want to Suffer Another Devastating Defeat by the Anti-Gays, Read This. Or Else.

“Or else” what? Or else we’re always going to be big, fat losers forever, with a big, fat “L” tattooed across our foreheads, that’s what.

The following Kos diary (reprinted with the kind permission of the author) is absolutely mandatory reading for anyone who really wants to know why the No On 8 campaign = epic fail.

There are things here I experienced myself; e.g., repeated pleas to the No On 8 campaign for something to do on the Web, which is the communication tool I use best, repeatedly ignored; countless suggestions for better broadcast ads and the need to directly address Yes On 8’s lies and smears, repeatedly ignored; secrecy, secrecy, and more secrecy (minor example; they wouldn’t tell me where my Election Day training was going to be until the night before, and would give me no other contact information); major frustration with No On 8’s crappy Web site and inexplicable inability to produce broadcast ads even one-eighth as hard-hitting as those being produced by the Courage Campaign (which never saw the light of day)…

Lots of things.

And there are many behind-the-scenes details no one could know without witnessing everything firsthand.

I could comment on every last line the author has written, but there’s no point, as I’d only be in agreement. What I did come to realize was how much faith I put in the No On 8 campaign solely because it was, indeed, the “only game in town.”

As our outgoing pResident once said, “Fool me once… er, fool me twice… errr… Won’t get fooled again.”

So, settle in, and do read every last word — your future, and mine, depends on it:

Proposition 8 postmortem
- from a senior volunteer

With suggestions for better campaigns in the future

This writeup is a rewrite of an extended series of comments that I originally emailed, post-election-day, in early November 2008 to a few no-on-8 campaign leaders. More recently it’s become apparent that a better writeup of my notes/analysis would be helpful, so I’ve done that here. I’ve also added a Recommendations section, not part of my original email comments, which offers some suggestions for future pro-marriage (equal marriage) efforts.

Context and my role: I served as a senior volunteer with the no-on-8 campaign in the final few months of its efforts, as the campaign ramped up its phone bank efforts. I handled phone bank location logistics, venue setup, teardown, refreshments, and technology for one of the larger weekly San Francisco bay area phone banks. The first organizing meeting that I attended was on September 3, 2008, a meeting at which the no-on-8 staff in attendance were asking for phone bank site leads and venues. The phone banks that I ran started on September 16. I also served as a “site captain” on election day, coordinating roughly a dozen teams of volunteers per the no-on-8 campaign’s (misguided but only game in town) strategy of handing out no-on-8 “palm cards” to voters at the polls.

I’m not and was not paid no-on-8 staff, and these comments aren’t intended to be a criticism of the paid field staff, who were simply executing a campaign designed higher up the no-on-8 decision-making chain. I believe that paid staff did a solid job of executing what was fundamentally a flawed campaign strategy.

Since I wasn’t involved either as paid staff nor at the strategic decision-making level, the experiences backing up my comments are entirely from the “worm’s-eye-view” of a volunteer who observed what the campaign was asking people to do for the 60 days leading up to election day.

Other postmortems that I know of:

http://www.rollingstone.com/…
http://calitics.com/…
http://www.openleft.com/…

PART I: Problems with the no-on-8 campaign

1. Reliance on focus groups, and the search for magic words

The no-on-8 campaign was focus-group driven and went searching for “magic words” to say to voters rather than following the hearts-and-minds strategy that the marriage equality movement, and the PFLAGs of the world, have been using successfully for years. From the very first volunteer recruiting meeting that I attended, paid staff made it extremely clear that the campaign had used focus groups to determine a messaging strategy, and that the campaign intended to stick by this messaging strategy. We were also informed that Dewey Square had been retained by the campaign as the consulting firm, and that Dewey Square “had never lost one of these ballot measure campaigns”. In September and October, the campaign treated this factoid as sufficient to rebut any and all strategic questions about the campaign itself.

This is the second time that I’ve participated in a stop-the-anti-marriage-ballot measure effort that was “focus-group driven” (the first time was California Proposition 22 back in 2000, which had identical language). I’ve since resolved that I will not participate in any future pro-LGBT ballot measure effort whose messaging is “focus-group-driven”. I’ve been burned twice by this approach — I’m not going to be burned a third time.

The focus group approach resulted in a negative-language campaign which made no attempt to persuade voters to vote FOR equal marriage, but instead unsuccessfully attempted to attach a few key words such as “unfair” and “wrong” to the ballot measure. Specifically, the key messaging of the phone script that thousands of volunteer no-on-8 phone bankers read on the phone was this text: “Regardless of what you think about marriage, it’s wrong to take away fundamental rights.” More on what I think about this message later below.

2. Same-sex married couples were invisible

The campaign failed to use the most valuable asset available to the campaign, which was the thousands of already-married California same-sex couples. This strategic failure appears to be the consequence of the “focus group” strategy which resulted in a conclusion that “the voters just aren’t ready to vote FOR marriage equality.”. Such an attitude strikes me as an insult to California’s majority-Democratic voting base, and to me fails even a rudimentary sanity check. Since even the California legislature was willing, twice, to vote for full equal marriage, the voters can handle the same. I wanted to see a campaign that asked the voters to vote FOR marriage equality.

The campaign could have got newly-married lesbian couple Mitzi and Fritzi and their darling 2-year-old baby Carla on the TV. Cut an ad where the couple lovingly holding the baby looks into the camera and says “please don’t take our marriage away!” Closing message: “protect marriage for all California families. Vote NO on proposition 8.” Strategically this is a much stronger position to be in. Look at the messaging that results from this type of ad:

- The language and framing of “protection” and “protection of children” are seized as a no-on-8 value rather than a yes-on-8 value. To be pro-LGBT is to protect people, to vote no is to protect people.

- Message: No-on-8 is protecting poor innocent women.

- Message: No-on-8 is protecting babies (Yes, I’m quite willing to use children in ads if the parents consent)

- Message: Yes-on-8 are heartless bastards who want to hurt Mitzi, Fritzi, and poor little baby Carla.

Instead, in October the no-on-8 campaign suddenly found yes-on-8 playing the usual “homosexuals are out to get your children at school!” card (a strategy which should have been NO surprise), and by that point it was too late to reverse the media frame.

3. Refusal to advocate for yes-on-equality

The no-on-8 campaign refused to take a “yes on equal marriage” stance, again insisting that focus groups said that this wouldn’t sell. Well guess what, those focus groups sure didn’t produce a message that sold — it’s time to try something new. I will no longer volunteer for a marriage campaign that refuses to take a “yes on equal marriage” stance.

4. Nearly content-free web site

The noonprop8.com web site was awful. As in, really awful. As in, “there wasn’t any serious persuasive or well-reasoned content there at all” awful. I didn’t even realize this problem until an acquaintance, who had clearly been doing some research about the “yes” and “no” arguments, asked me the traditional question of “aren’t domestic partnerships equivalent and sufficient?” This is the “isn’t separate but equal sufficient?” question, and it’s a very common question from people who are actively thinking about the issue — possible “persuadables”. I went looking for the official response to this question on the no-on-8 site, blithely assuming that there would surely be an extensive equal-marriage FAQ document somewhere in there, and was stunned to find NOTHING, no basic issues FAQ at all. There was a basic “fact vs. fiction” document which mostly rebutted anti-LGBT claims about proposition 8, but nothing to answer the obvious questions that persuadables have when they start to seriously think about marriage and LGBT people.

I had to head over to PFLAG to get a well-written response about “why we need marriage equality and not just domestic partnerships [DP]”. The no-on-8 campaign’s failure to adopt a YES-on-marriage-equality position meant that strategically, the campaign wasn’t willing to put up content that responded to basic and common questions like this.

A related question that also came my way, from a strong ally, was: “what rights, exactly, does prop 8 eliminate?” The answer actually appears to be “technically, NONE at this time from a California civil perspective” because California domestic partnership already extends ALL California marriage rights to domestic partners, and the federal government doesn’t recognize either status. A more nuanced approach is necessary to explain why domestic partnership isn’t enough, and that nuance requires going the yes-on-equal-marriage messaging route. The no-on-8 ballot argument as printed in the California Voter Information Guide claims that there are “nine real differences between marriage and domestic partnerships” but fails to identify what these are, nor does the noonprop8.com web site ever bother to tell us.

5. Botched ballot measure argument text

The no-on-8 ballot arguments as submitted to the official California general election guide look like a right-wing lunatic rant, plus they make severe communications errors. Per the structure of California’s printed election guides in the ballot measure section, the “yes” side gets the first set of text, then the “no” side gets a rebuttal. Next, the “no” side gets a section to argue its case for “no”, followed by a closing rebuttal from the “yes” side.

As I write this, I have a copy of my November 2008 California election guide in front of me.

Here is the first paragraph of the “yes” argument. This is the first paragraph that the reader saw (assuming that anybody actually reads these election guides — this year’s guide was 144 pages long) about proposition 8:

“Proposition 8 is simple and straightforward. It contains the same 14 words that were previously approved in 2000 by over 61% of California voters: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

That’s easy for the reader to understand, and it’s probably persuasive to a significant number of people. “Oh, this is simple and it’s just reaffirming what we’ve already done anyway. Sounds good to me.”

Next, here’s the initial text of the no-on-8 rebuttal to the above “yes” text. All capital letters are in the original:

“Don’t be tricked by scare tactics. - PROP 8 DOESN’T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH SCHOOLS
There’s NOT ONE WORD IN 8 ABOUT EDUCATION.”

The no-on-8 rebuttal text goes on like this with its INSANELY HEAVY USE of CAPITAL LETTERS which makes the rebuttal look like a RIGHT-WING CRACKPOT RANT because people who RANDOMLY MASH DOWN THE CAPS LOCK KEY inevitably look like INTERNET CRAZIES as I’m demonstrating RIGHT NOW in this PARAGRAPH!!! The no-on-8 rebuttal text is literally about 50% all-caps.

The contrast is striking. The “yes” argument leads with a simple argument in normal text, inviting the reader to join in agreement. The no-on-8 rebuttal, by contrast, is as if somebody pointed a bullhorn in your face, pulled an argument about schools out of the middle of nowhere (though it is in fact buried in the “yes” text), and started screaming at you.

Note also how the no-on-8 rebuttal begins by repeating a right-wing talking point (”the gays are out to get your children at school!”) and then denying it. This approach to doing rebuttals is a classic framing mistake. You can’t defeat an opponent’s frame by simply repeating it and then denying it, because the repetition itself simply reinforces the frame. Every LGBT supporter who hasn’t already done so needs, desperately, to read George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant!, which is an introduction to framing and messaging for progressives, written by an expert in cognitive science (Lakoff). Or for a web-based crash course, you can go right now to http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/…

As Lakoff has mentioned in similar trainings, Nixon said “I am not a crook” and people said “oh, crook? Nixon’s a crook”.

Similarly, as Robert Bray, former director of the SPIN project (www.spinproject.org), noted in a framing training that I took several years ago, if you get up in front of a crowd and say:

“Child molestation? Child molestation?? This has NOTHING to do with child molestation!!”

Well guess what, yes it does, because you just said it three times. Congratulations, you lose.

For everybody who contributed to that horrible no-on-8 rebuttal, I hereby require you to go read George Lakoff and stop writing any ballot measure arguments until you’ve written “I WILL NOT REPEAT RIGHT-WING FRAMES” 1000 times on the chalkboard right along with Bart Simpson.

This goes for you too, Geoff Kors (Kors is Executive Director of Equality California, EQCA.org) — every damn time you go on Fox “News” and repeat the right-wing term “tax relief”, you’re playing into right-wing frames that help to elect right-wing Republicans to office. I stopped donating to EQCA (though I did donate specifically to the campaign) because you have a history of going on Fox echoing right-wing language while thinking you’re helping LGBT people. The Lakoff crash-course web framing training has a discussion of how the frame “tax relief” is destructive to the progressive cause.

6. Fundamental flaws in the no-on-8 phone script and messaging

I disagree with the fundamental approach of the “regardless of what you think about marriage, it’s wrong to deny people rights…” phone script. This attempt at magic words, which again was probably focus-group driven, is what I’d call “preemptive surrender on our core issue”. The unwritten preamble that’s IMPLIED by the “regardless…” sentence is:

“[We acknowledge that same-sex marriage is sinful, sick, and dirty, but] regardless of what you think about marriage…”

The Rolling Stone no-on-8 postmortem whose URL I listed earlier agrees with this critique, and refers to this tactic as “affirm[ing] the homophobia of the swing voters it was courting.”

The no-on-8 phone script refused to take a positive stance on marriage but instead conceded that territory to the anti-gay side, leaving no-on-8 to attempt the much weaker magic-word-association game of “unfair” and “wrong”. I say: bull hockey. This homophobic phone script sucks. The best defense is a good offense: we need to GO ON THE OFFENSE (he said, resorting to the caps-lock-key mashing that he had so recently mocked) and claim marriage as our own. It’s the LGBT community and allies who are protecting marriage and making it better, not yes-on-8. Same-sex marriage is beautiful — say it! Say it again! Here, I’ll do it for you — “Same-sex marriage is beautiful!” Because the more we say that, the more we make it true for everybody. Focus groups won’t tell you that because we haven’t made it enough of a reality for the focus group participants yet. The more we refuse to say “same-sex marriage is beautiful”, the more we concede the moral terrain to our opposition.

As with the ballot measure rebuttal, the “regardless of what you think…” language feels like it’s written by people who don’t understand the basic cognitive science issues that Lakoff covers in his books. If you say “regardless of what you think about marriage”, or equivalently, if you say “it’s not about marriage, it’s actually about X”, you’ve already got people thinking about marriage. It’s too late to tell them that it’s NOT about marriage, because it IS now about marriage, because you just said “marriage”. So what thought processes are taking place in the mind of a likely voter? Probably something like this:

“Well hmm, as long as this person on the phone has brought up the topic of what I think about marriage, what do I think? Well, I think that marriage is between a man and a woman. That makes sense.”

I’ll speculate that this phone script may have been focus-group tested to swing a few percentage points of voters, but I’m not buying it. On a strategic level, it’s a fail. Pro-LGBT ballot measure campaigns need to get rid of the inside-the-beltway bean-counting tactics and start advocating for marriage equality.

Here’s the message I want to see: “We believe that ALL California families deserve the freedom to marry, and the protections that marriage provides. Marriage makes families healthy, protects children, and makes our society stronger. As Californians, let’s make California a safe, healthy place for ALL families. Vote NO on 8.” Note how here I’m seizing language right out of Lakoff’s nurturing-parent worldview: “protection”, “healthy”, “strong society”, “safety”. This is a winning frame for our side.

7. Failure to anticipate and preempt yes-on-8 messaging.

This complaint has been covered in other written venues so it probably doesn’t need much reiteration here. You know for a fact that yes-on-8 is going to use the “they’re after the children!” argument, so for God’s sake hit them first on that and take away their ability to use it. You also know they’re going to use the “churches will be forced to marry gays!” argument, so defuse or reframe before those words even get out of their mouths.

8. Tactical: people don’t vote after dark in Santa Clara County.

On election day, the campaign deployed thousands of volunteers to cover polling sites around the state and hand out no-on-8 “palm cards”. In retrospect this appears to have been a last-ditch hail-Mary attempt to win an additional half a percentage point, or to just make it look like a lot of volunteers were being mobilized for something constructive, or who knows what. I had the not-so-fantastic duty, as it turned out, of co-running a “hub site” which was responsible for dispatching volunteers in teams of 2-5 people to slightly over a dozen polling places in the Mountain View, California area. We had great volunteer turnout, but I don’t think this was an effective ground game or that it persuaded very many voters.

The no-on-8 campaign appears to have made little to no calculation about vote-by-mail voters and early voters. In Santa Clara County, vote-by-mail is something like 50% of the vote, perhaps more. And empirically, we found that almost everybody who does vote physically on election day does so in the morning, not after work. This put us as co-captains of the election-day hub site into the painful situation of dispatching 50+ volunteers to polling sites after dark (sunset was roughly at 6:00 PM), where as it turned out nobody was voting. Half of our evening shifts called in to ask if they could be redeployed because they were only seeing 1 voter every 5 minutes, and half of those voters were dropping off sealed absentee ballots which weren’t going to change regardless of how many palm cards we pushed at people (and in the dark?? Come on, what voter wants to have election material pushed at them at 6:30 PM in the dark when they’re just trying to vote and get home?)

9. Tactical: failure to do proper, well-understood election-day get-out-the-vote (GOTV)

So, no-on-8 campaign people: WTF with the election-day GOTV? When I volunteered for the Jerry McNerney campaign, on election day we did a traditional “aggressive pollcheck-based GOTV”, which works like this:

1. You do GOTV phone calls or door-knocks to all your 1’s and 2’s, which you’ve predetermined from your phone calls in the weeks prior. For those not versed here in my election jargon: a “1″ is a very strong supporter, a “2″ is a likely supporter. Your “1’s” and “2’s” are the people you’re trying to get to the polls.

2. After you’ve finished step 1, it’s now noon, so you send a team to the polling location and look up the posted list of voters who have voted already. Per California election law, the poll-site staff post this information every few hours and update it. You work through this posted list and cross off the names of all of your 1’s and 2’s who have voted.

3. Now you do a second round of GOTV phone calls or door-knocks to those who remain on your now-pruned 1’s-and-2’s list.

4. It’s now 4 PM, so you go to the polling location and get the updated list of voters who have voted. You cross more people off your 1’s and 2’s list.

5. Wash, rinse, repeat until polls close. You keep phoning 1’s and 2’s who haven’t voted until the polls close or until they vote.

For no-on-8 on election day we had teams covering dozens of key polling locations throughout the state, yet no-on-8 didn’t take the obvious step of having these volunteers get the “voters-who-have-voted so far” information and relay it to whoever was doing the GOTV phone calls. I don’t understand at all why no-on-8 didn’t do this. From where I stand, it looks like utter incompetence on the part of the campaign.

10. Insufficient engagement of progressive church allies along their traditional strengths

The no-on-8 campaign could have worked better with its progressive church allies. In September 2008, I offered to campaign staff the possibility of organizing some no-on-8 religious events somewhere around election eve. I was told in very clear terms, by staff, that “the campaign doesn’t want this” because… wait for it… the FOCUS GROUPS said that it was a bad idea. In the end, yes-on-8 held a Qualcomm Stadium rally (which apparently sucked badly), and no-on-8 allies independently organized and held several large-scale (for progressive churches) no-on-8 religious services in 3 cities on the same Sunday. The result, thankfully for the good guys, is that the media reported “religious groups on both sides stage events”. The no-on-8 campaign should be thankful that the churches ignored the focus groups, otherwise the headlines would have said “People of faith hold mass yes-on-8 event” with a picture of some PFOX guy mournfully praying.

To be clear, I had no problem organizing phone banking instead of organizing a religious service, which can be a pain to pull together anyway. However, when a campaign tells some of its allies that their core competency of “doing religious events and thereby bringing moral credibility to the no-on-8 message” isn’t welcome, it tends to stunt the ability of the allies to help the campaign.

11. Secrecy = Death

In September and on into early October, the campaign actively discouraged me from posting information about phone bank times, days, and locations to the web. Incredible yet true. The messaging that I heard from the campaign was “don’t post information about when or where our phone banks are taking place, just leave it to the campaign to communicate this on a week-by-week basis please”. In the early weeks of the phone banking there was a desperate hunger in the activist community for information about when and where the phone banks were taking place, yet I was actively discouraged from posting information about them on a public blog. A few weeks later, I heard this message from staff at the phone bank “gee, we just aren’t making our total-call numbers on the phone calls, we don’t understand what the problem is!” Well, when you actively discourage the progressive community from engaging in precisely the sort of viral advertising and communication that we do best, low volunteer turnout is quite likely to be the result. A few weeks later, I noted that no-on-8 had finally added a web page at noonprop8.com that publicly listed the phone bank locations, dates, and times… in other words, it was doing in October exactly what I had been told not to do in September. And sure enough, a week later at the phone bank I heard from staff, “we’re doing great on our phone bank numbers, we’re blowing through these call lists!” And attendance at phone banking had gone way up.

Activists, please take this lesson to heart: a culture of movement secrecy will fail you every time. I recommend Gene Sharpe’s The Politics of Nonviolent Action for a discussion how a culture of secrecy can stifle a social change movement. I’ve had to fight this fight in various activist venues over the years, and it still often doesn’t get through. People can get paranoid — they may want to overcontrol the volunteers, overcontrol the flow information, control who shows up at events; people get paranoid about “outsiders” or “spies” or whatever, and all that fear is contagious. Fear strangles a movement. Fear turns off potential allies. It prevents a movement from taking the steps necessary to succeed. If you’re refusing to publish information about when your phone banks are happening because you’re “afraid that spies for the other side might show up”, fire yourself and get new leadership, because you’re killing your own justice movement. I fully support the concept of message discipline, and I strongly oppose the “do-your-own-thingism” which so often pervades progressive activism and demolishes progressive message coherence, but there’s a difference between enforcing messaging discipline, versus telling your volunteers not to share information about where the upcoming phone banks are located.

12. Failure to understand or use internet and web media

No-on-8 got its clock cleaned in at least two areas by yes-on-8: Youtube videos, and Google Adwords/Adsense. No-on-8 appears to have been run as a 1990’s campaign that had limited understanding of internet used as new-media communication. Yes, there was a (wretched) no-on-8 web site, but yes-on-8 knew how to effectively use newer web technologies while no-on-8 apparently didn’t.

12.1: Youtube: yes-on-8 dominated, no-on-8 failed utterly

These particular comments are specific to YouTube, however they apply to any internet video hosting service that supports user-uploaded content for public viewing.

Technical discussion that I was privy to in the final weeks of the campaign revealed that:

– Yes-on-8 videos were consistently ranked in the top 10 when searching on basic keywords such as “california prop 8″

– Yes-on-8 made a concerted effort to get their volunteers to rank up the videos so that they’d always win in Google’s search algorithm. And of course, video up-ranking is a computer-and-keyboard based task that can be done by armies of people anywhere in the world… such as, shall we say, to pick a completely non-hypothetical example, Utah.

– No-on-8 comments posted in the comments section of yes-on-8 videos would immediately get downrated by an army of yes-on-8 minions, making it impossible to have an open debate or post rebuttals within the Youtube comments section.

– No-on-8 videos were also posted on Youtube, but initially the no-on-8 campaign didn’t even know enough to tag these videos with appropriate keywords so that they’d hit Google searches for basic terms like “proposition 8″.

– Progressive blogs were doing a lot of “look at this horrible yes-on-8 video, it’s really nasty” web linking, which per Google’s ranking algorithm is a vote FOR the video. This is a general problem that ballot measure campaigns will need to solve in general: simply doing opposition research by PLAYING an opposition video, or by LINKING to an opposition video, actually helps the opposition. “Number of views of this video” is a tracked value that presumably contributes to the up-ranking of a YouTube video.

– Even after no-on-8 tagged the videos with appropriate keywords, they never made it into the higher-ranked video lists because yes-on-8 had already invested a lot of time up-ranking their own ads.

RESULT: anybody who searched on anything related to proposition 8 on YouTube always got yes-on-8 videos and ads, and never got no-on-8 ads. This is a TOTAL FAIL for no-on-8. The campaign needed somebody on the staff who understood the tactics of upranking videos and how the comments systems can be gamed for or against you. Pay one of those evil “search optimization” firms for some consulting time if you have to.

12.2: The Google AdSense yes-on-8 ad bomb.

“AdSense” is Google’s ad product that allows web site owners to place Google-brokered ads onto their own web sites. Don’t confuse this with the ads that appear on www.google.com. For example, go to www.americablog.com and scroll to the bottom, where you’ll probably see a small “Ads by Google” section. These are “AdSense” ads. These ads are relayed to the web site by Google’s ad system and are not pre-selected by the web site owner.

Google AdSense is used by hundreds of thousands of web page owners as a way to make some money as a commission from Google by placing the Google-brokered ads onto their site.

On Monday Nov. 3 and Tuesday Nov. 4, yes-on-8 engaged in a mass advertising bid across all “targeted verticals” available within the Google Adsense program for advertisers. This yes-on-8 advertising also presumably used Google’s geotargeting system, which allows advertisers to pay only to display their ads to viewers believed to be in a certain section of the country. Geotargeting saves vast quantities of money by allowing the advertiser to only pay to show the web ads to, say, people who are in California rather than people in Florida.

The result of the mass yes-on-8 ad buy was that for hundreds of thousands of different web sites, anybody in California who looked at one of those web pages saw one or more “yes-on-8″ ads. I’d speculate that yes-on-8 did the same thing with Yahoo ads, however I haven’t researched that. So it’s likely that for all intents and purposes, anybody in the state of California who used the internet on Monday or Tuesday Nov. 3-4 saw a yes-on-8 ad. That doesn’t mean that the user clicked on the ad and made it to the yes-on-8 web site, but certainly there would have been a lot of click-throughs.

Since the internet has just this year passed newspapers as people’s primary source of news, this yes-on-8 ad buy probably had a significant impact.

While no-on-8 was doing a certain amount of ad buys — there were very sporadic reports of a no-on-8 ad showing up on certain web pages — there was nothing on the scale of the yes-on-8 ad buy.

Pro-LGBT ballot measure campaigns need to understand the dynamics and impact of the “mass message-bombing” that the right wing is using against us — this was done with yard signs on election eve as well, for example. I don’t know how effective it is, but obviously the anti-LGBT team believes their money was well-spent, because they went ahead and did it.

12.3 Myspace and Facebook.

I don’t use these social networking systems so I can’t speak to how well no-on-8 exploited them compared to yes-on-8, however given no-on-8’s performance in other areas, I’m not optimistic.

Strategically, the principle that we need to understand is this: the Christian evangelical community has a very long history of rapidly adopting to the use of new media technologies for its communication and expansion use. Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network was built starting from a tiny UHF station back in the days when nobody knew what “UHF” was, and you had to buy the special UHF loop antenna at Radio Shack to even receive his show. Prior to that, evangelicals effectively used radio in the early days of that technology. NEWS FLASH: the Christian Right has learned how to use the internet and all of its modern services. If you’re not savvy about modern internet media, your campaign is at a severe competitive disadvantage. For the proposition 8 campaign, yes-on-8 completely outmaneuvered no-on-8 in the internet media space.

PART II: Recommendations

1. Work proactively, don’t wait until you’re forced to react. Do pro-LGBT education every year, all the time.

“Peacetime campaigns” appear to be easier than “wartime campaigns”, by which I mean that it appears to be easier to do the right messaging during intervals when there is NOT an anti-LGBT ballot measure coming up. In my experience, as soon as the LGBT equality movement needs to shift into defend-against-the-ballot-measure mode, all thoughts of long-term messaging and strategy go out the window, and people are in a rush to “mortgage the future on behalf of the present”, as we might say. So my suggestion is to start doing, or strengthen existing, public visibility and communications actions today, rather than waiting for anti-LGBT groups to put a measure on the ballot. Start a GSA (gay-straight alliance). GEt with the local PFLAG and join their speakers’ group, or jumpstart the speakers’ group if they don’t have one that’s active.

2. Tell stories of real same-sex couples. Aka: “go for the heart, and the head will follow”.

My belief is that all anti-LGBT efforts, rhetoric, and arguments are fundamentally prejudice-based. Prejudice happens as a part of the built-in human process of category creation: it happens when I put myself into a group called “in-group” or “my tribe”, and I put LGBT people into a different group called “that out-group over there” or “other”. Once I’ve put the stigmatized group into the category called “other”, I then martial whatever cultural resources or language happen to be available to me to justify my categorization: Bible verses, appeals to history, appeals to “tradition”, appeals to “nature”, etc. To break through the prejudice requires that we, as LGBT people and allies, humanize the Other. Doing verse-by-verse rebuttals of Bible verses generally isn’t going to help, because it isn’t the Bible that’s causing the prejudice, it’s the prejudice that causes people to choose to read the Bible in a certain way. I’ve done the verse-by-verse rebuttal work in the past, and it can be necessary AFTER prejudice reduction has already started, but it’s extremely unlikely to change any minds up front. As Rev. Peter Gomes has noted (and here I paraphrase), “it is not generally possible to use logic to get somebody out of a position that they didn’t use logic to get into to begin with.” Start with winning the heart, and then suddenly you’ll find that the Bible part falls into place.

So my suggestion is to seek ongoing ways to humanize and normalize same-sex relationships and marriage (yes, we have to use the M word!) as part of normal, healthy, positive, loving human existence. This is part of the work that many PFLAG and GSA (gay-straight-alliance) groups have been doing for a while.

Storytelling about real, loving same-sex couples that you know is a win here. Advocates for equal marriage need to have multiple (true!) stories at their disposal that they can share in social contexts. Tell people about the lesbian couple raising a kid. Tell them about the gay couple living down the street who do yardwork and go to football games together.

On the public visibility front, in California the yes-on-marriage movement has made efforts at various periodic visibility actions, typically centered on Valentine’s Day and “tax day” (April 30) when tax returns are due. “Tax day” events try to get people to hold signs at post offices saying “we want the marriage tax” or similar, using various equal-marriage messaging.

3. Know your framing rules

The usual advice about framing applies. Don’t repeat the arguments or language of the opposition; reframe the debate. Read your George Lakoff, please.

4. Anticipate the opposition (duh…)

If and when a ballot measure or similar right-wing attack looms large, anticipate the arguments of the opposition and move to defuse them before they’re even articulated. You know that the anti-gay crowd is going to say “they’re after our children!”, so come up with ways to preemptively blunt that attack. My postmortem suggestion to the no-on-8 team was to take the “look at these lovely same-sex couples raising their own happy healthy children!” approach. Argue that equal marriage protects children, equal marriage promotes healthy families. We need to own (reclaim) all of those good words: “healthy”, “family”, “strong”, “protection”, etc.

Similarly we now know that the anti-gay industry will use the “churches will lose their tax-exempt status, or be forced to conduct same-sex marriages” or whatever pile of lies it morphs into next week, since that argument was very effective for them in California. The equal-marriage movement will need to find a way to flush that argument — it unfortunately might require addressing it directly, maybe simply with a lot of credible authorities saying “that’s a lie.” I saw the “we’ll lose our 501c3 tax-exempt status!” stunt pulled on us in a regional church governing body meeting several years ago, and in that case the argument was stomped on when the respected moderator of the assembly spoke from the floor mike and said he had checked with multiple attorneys and that the claim was simply not true. But it required a well-known, trusted authority figure to say it.

5. Campaigns: understand and use internet media

Use of a variety of forms of internet media is now a mandatory part of any ballot measure campaign’s media strategy. For those who haven’t been watching, in 2008 “the web” surpassed print newspapers in the ranking of Americans’ primary news source. It’s no longer acceptable to slap a few HTML pages up and call it a web site. Your campaign’s senior media director must understand the use of social network sites such as MySpace and FaceBook, the use of online campaign-produced and activist-produced videos, viral marketing, and techniques for up-ranking videos and the attack techniques that your opposition can use to downrank you. You need to know the difference between Google AdWords and Google AdSense, and how to use Google Analytics — with similar knowledge of Yahoo’s advertising offerings. You need to have a campaign budget for banner ad and keyword-targeted internet ad buys. You need to know how to build an online activist base and ask them via email to take action, both online and offline.

Because whether you’re appropriately using the internet or not, I guarantee you that the anti-LGBT movement knows how to use the technology, and will crush you in a demographic space (voters under 29) that ought to be strongly pro-LGBT if you’re not equally savvy.

6. Campaigns: understand ballot-casting patterns and do proper election-day GOTV

When do people vote in your state? How do people vote in your state? Does your state have early voting? Vote-by-mail? What percentage of people use these voting options? Which demographic groups use them — your supporters or your non-supporters? Whom do you need to turn out, how, and when? These are nuts-and-bolts questions which are critical to any election ground game. If 50% of the people in a county vote by mail, 20% vote the morning of election day, and 25% vote between noon and 5 PM by dropping off pre-sealed absentee ballots, it’s not an effective use of your volunteer base to attempt in-person voter persuasion on election day at the polls. Your GOTV efforts need to start whenever people start to receive ballots. In many states, that’s several weeks prior to election day.

And for the love of Mike, for counties where election-day turnout matters, do a proper phone-call-based GOTV. Have pre-generated lists of 1’s and 2’s and call them. Then call them again. Keep calling them or knocking on their doors until they tell you OK, they’ve voted already. This approach is old-school, and it still works… if people haven’t already voted by mail, that is.

---

 
Despite the enormous pain of the passage of proposition 8, the good news is that despite a badly botched no-on-8 campaign, support for marriage equality in California has shifted from about 40% to about 50% in just 8 years. The “tipping point” years that we’re in right now are particularly painful, because it’s right when you’re just under 50% support that your opposition throws the most money, the most resources, the most of everything at you. They know that it’s endgame now — they have to pull out all the stops now to preserve hetero privilege before public opinion shifts permanently in favor of LGBT equality on yet another front.

Proposition 8 will, in the end, go down in flames. It might happen in 2009, if the California Supreme Court accurately recognizes that when the tyranny of the majority gangs up on a scapegoated minority to deny equal protection, it’s a “revision” of the California constitution rather than a simple constitutional modification. Or it might not happen for 20 years, when a no-longer-hardcore-right U.S. Supreme Court gets the LGBT version of Loving vs. Virginia and issues a blanket invalidation of all of the residual state anti-marriage laws in those states that haven’t already bothered to repeal them. Or it might happen via California voter repeal action within the next few years. We don’t yet know when marriage equality will happen. What we do know is that the message of the full humanity of LGBT people works, it resonates, it changes hearts and minds. Now let’s transform our ballot measure messaging from a weak negative into a strong “yes-on-marriage” positive, stop using focus groups, and fix our internet and election-week tactics. If we can do that, victory for marriage equality will arrive sooner, and much more easily, than we might ever expect.

---

 
Bruce Hahne is a sporadic LGBT equality activist, and a former board member of More Light Presbyterians (mlp.org). He can be reached at hahne at io dot com.

The opinions I’ve expressed in this essay are mine, i.e. I don’t speak for any organization in which I presently serve, or have served.

Copyright (c) 2008 by Bruce Hahne. All rights reserved. Non-commercial, non-profit republication and forwarding of this essay as part of efforts to support LGBT equality is permitted and encouraged. For all other reuse, please contact the author.

Original link, with comments.

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ACTION: Nationwide DOMA Protest, Saturday, January 10, 2009

All the info, including downloadable fliers, at Join the Impact:

The fight for equal rights never rests!

We joined together for the November 15th National Day of Protest that shook our nation!

We joined for a night of action that shed light on our struggle as we came together to Light Up the Night for Equal Rights…

Now, on Saturday January 10th, 2009
We ask you to join us in making the LARGEST IMPACT YET!

Let’s take our message all the way up the ladder to President Elect Barack Obama himself!

On January 10th, we will come together as one UNITED FRONT asking the LGBTQ community to join us in signing an Open Letter to President Barack Obama, during a NATIONAL DOMA PROTEST.

This letter will remind President Elect Barack Obama of the promises he made to us. It will also serve as a pledge from our community that we will hold him to his promises and help him achieve them.

We can’t just put a letter online and ask that people sign it.

We need to take to the streets. As we all know…

VISIBILITY IS THE KEY TO EQUALITY!

Outreach & Education Will End Discrimination.

We MUST Infiltrate, to Educate, and Stop Hate!

HERE’S WHAT YOU CAN DO…

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Latest Obama Dis: Transition Office Hearing Too Much Whining About Our Piddly Little Civil Rights, No Longer Accepts Postcards

How else can you read it?

But I’m getting ahead of myself, as usual.

civilrightsfront.com came up with an idea for folks 1) pissed off about Rick Warren, and 2) who believe that Barack Obama actually gives a damn about what The People have to say (we’re not knocking the idea; we just don’t think Obama gives a damn):

President-elect Obama has chosen Rick Warren (founder of the Saddleback Church and MAJOR proponent of Prop 8!) to give the inaugural invocation. That is not acceptable. We must tell him so. Here’s what you do.

BUY A POSTCARD - It would be great if it had the name of your city or state on it, but feel free to get creative. Make your own, use one that you have around the house, or grab a free one at your local restaurant. Heck, why not get a bunch of different ones? The more, the better.

WRITE A MESSAGE - A unified message would be ideal. Let’s keep it focused. I recommend something like this…

Dear President-elect Obama,

Rick Warren should not deliver the inaugural invocation. He is a proponent of legislation that is discriminatory towards the LGBT community. Please choose someone who will speak to all Americans.

SIGN YOUR NAME…

Nice idea. Now here’s the slap in the face:

Since we’ve flooded the transition office, they no longer accept postcards. …

Well, isn’t that a fine how-do-you-do? (Actually, it’s a fine “F.U.” — I’m just trying not spell out the f-bomb very often, in a small effort to avoid being blocked by every nanny filter on the Web.)

civilrightsfront.com is suggesting you circumvent the Obama team’s “I can’t hear you! Lalalalalalalalala!” move by putting your postcard in a #10 envelope and mailing it.

More info at the link, including the address of the Obama transition office, if you want to do it.

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Told You So, Mormons: Post-Proposition 8, You’re Back to Being a Non-Christian Cult

Before I was halfway through reading the second sentence of the following article aloud to my lovely and insightful wife, she stated with “I told you so” conviction that would singe the the big, gay goatee right off Rick Warren’s double chin:

“I warned [the Mormons] not to be the Radical Right Wing’s bitches, because as soon as they stopped being useful [to the evangelicals], they’d go right back to faux-Christian/cult status.”

And say so she did:

Yes, they’ve been playing friendly for the past few months or so and at the moment they’re all but fawning over the LDS church. But as soon as the Mormons cease to be a useful tool in their war against gays it will be right back to Mormons are a cult that we don’t even recognize as Christians. I realize feeling like heroes for a few months is a grand thing, but is it worth it just to play butt-monkey to people like Dobson, Colson, Donohue, et. al.?

And so did I:

The only thing all these groups agree on is that gays are bad and should be persecuted and legislated out of society without recourse, through all the ballot measures money can buy. And … nobody involved in the anti-gay crusade realizes they’re all just chumps (Chino Blanco’s apt word) for the same ugly little man behind the curtain. And when all is said and done, they’ll all go back to hating one another again.

Repeatedly.

We just didn’t think our words would bear out quite so quickly.

From that bastion of right-wing mania, WingNutDaily (bold emphasis mine):

Focus on the Family website
yanks Glenn Beck interview

Christian ministry cites its failure
to alert readers author is Mormon

Focus on the Family, the evangelical organization founded by Dr. James Dobson, has removed from its website an interview with former CNN host Glenn Beck following complaints over the politically conservative TV personality’s Mormon faith.

The original article about Beck’s best-selling new book, “The Christmas Sweater,” appeared on the ministry’s CitizenLink website on Dec. 19, but three days later an article published on ChristianNewsWire criticized Focus for promoting a Mormon “as a Christian.”

“While Glenn’s social views are compatible with many Christian views, his beliefs in Mormonism are not,” writes Steve McConkey of Underground Apologetics on ChristianNewsWire. “The CitizenLink story does not mention Beck’s Mormon faith, however the story makes it look as if Beck is a Christian who believes in the essential doctrines of the faith.”

The article has since been pulled from the CitizenLink website. …

The Christian Post reports that Pastor Dustin S. Seger of Shepherd’s Fellowship of Greensboro, N.C., writes in his blog Grace in the Triad, “They use Mr. Beck’s story as a way to show that hope can be found in God, which is true enough; the problem is that Mr. Beck’s god is not the Triune God of the Bible nor is his Jesus the Jesus of the Bible.”

“Through the years, Focus on the Family has done great things to help the family,” writes McConkey of Underground Apologetics. “However, to promote a Mormon as a Christian is not helpful to the cause of Jesus Christ. For Christians to influence society, Christians should be promoting the central issues of the faith properly without opening the door to false religions.” …

More at the link.

Told you so, Mormons. Dobson and his ilk used you like a condom.

And you thought Proposition 8 was your ticket to mainstream acceptance. You deliberately harmed total strangers to make LDS, Inc., look “normal” to Christian fundamentalists who will pat your pretty little heads as long as you do what you’re told, but who will never, ever accept you as equals. (Gee, now you know how it feels, eh? Not that you’ll ever learn from it.)

What a bunch of chumps. Patsys. Schmucks.

Payback sure is a bitch.

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December 28, 2008

Salt Lake Tribune Reflects on Mormons’ “Year of Scrutiny”

Coming from the Salt Lake Trib, you’d expect the usual Mormon self-pity piece, but it’s not as bad as all that. Oh, the defense of the LDS church is apparent — it “endured back-stabbing from would-be friends,” was “attacked as belonging to a cult,” and was “cast as pariahs during Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign,” etc.” — but to writer Peggy Fletcher Stack’s credit, “A year of scrutiny for the LDS Church” spends its last third acknowledging the church’s strange-bedfellows alliance with the evangelicals who disdain Mormonism, and asking how (and if) the church will deal with the consequences of its high-profile political involvement, even quoting Wayne Besen without comment:

In June, Mormons joined the Preserve Marriage Coalition at the request of Archbishop George Niederauer, the San Francisco Catholic leader who had previously led the Diocese of Salt Lake City. The First Presidency sent a letter to all California Mormons, urging them to support a ballot measure known as Proposition 8, which defined marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman.

The same Evangelical groups that had demeaned Mormonism as a cult during Romney’s campaign were now the LDS Church’s allies in the California fight.

“These new defenders of the Mormon faith have long been the most prolific Mormon-bashers in the nation,” said Wayne Besen, executive director of the Brooklyn-based gay-rights group Truth Wins Out. “[The two groups] have nothing in common but their anti-gay rhetoric.”

The measure passed on Nov. 4, and in the ensuing days, angry supporters of gay marriage protested outside LDS temples across the nation.

“The church’s support of Proposition 8 created a loud backlash and may make the church a symbol for the constriction of civil rights,” [Philip Barlow, Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University] says. “Will the church dig in on what it sees as a moral and constitutional issue or will common cause help repair or forge new allegiances with Evangelicals?”

Not many years from now, 2008 may be seen as a turning point for the LDS Church in addressing the reality of homosexuality, he says.

The church’s theology was formed at a time when homosexuality could only be construed in biblical terms as “abomination,” he says. “Because of experience and science, today church leaders see the issue in a more complex light. They distinguish between feelings and actions, and they acknowledge that we do not know the originating causes of same-sex attraction.”

LDS founder Joseph Smith once said that ” ‘by proving contraries, truth is made manifest,’” Barlow says. “As is the past, this may be a painful but auspicious moment in LDS history.”

No doubt it will be. Whether the “truth is made manifest” sooner or later is the question; the answer depends not on LDS, Inc., but on individual Mormons, and the strength (or lack) of their desire to realign the church’s priorities with the goal of working harmoniously with the larger, reality-based world in which they live — or be content to continue wearing their self-imposed persecution complex as a badge of honor.

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ACTION: Saddleback Protest, Sunday, January 18, 2009

From ALLorNotAtAll.org:

Evangelical Pastor Rick Warren has been invited by President-Elect Obama to deliver the invocation at the Presidential Inauguration. Rick Warren is one of the most unabashed anti-gay religious leaders in the country. He has compared same-sex couples that wanted to get married to child molesters and people in incestuous relationships, and he has a congregation of over 20,000 people who listen to his message. He is quoted as saying that “there is no reason to change the universal, historical definition of marriage to appease 2 percent of our population.” He claims to be a friend to the GLBT community, but unrepentant homosexuals are not allowed in his congregation, according to a page on their site…which mysteriously came down once he was invited to speak at the inauguration.

We are going to hold a peaceful protest with a positive tone outside his church the Sunday before he delivers the invocation in D.C. to let him know that we are not some radical, crazy fringe group that is merely looking to be appeased. It is time for us to go stand outside his homophobic bubble and show him the harm that he is causing. Show him that he cannot use religion and the Bible as a weapon. Show him that we are not child molesters or polygamists and that we are not looking to marry our pets. Show him that we are also kind, decent humans who deserve the same treatment in the eyes of the law as every member of his congregation.

There will be more details to come as we get closer, but please spread the word to all of your friends who live in the Southern California area. This isn’t going to be an angry protest where we scream at an empty church in the middle of the week. This is a peaceful event where we will stand there and make all the congregants see that we are completely worthy of equality and respect.

Just to be clear, this is not a protest against all Evangelicals at all. This is a protest in front of one man’s congregation to let him know that his views and his pulpit are causing great harm to his fellow humans.

Please join us and stand up for your rights and the rights of your friends and loved ones.

P.S. We will talk more about transportation as things move closer to the date.

Date: Sunday, January 18, 2009

Time: 11:00am - 2:00pm

Location: Saddleback Church in Lake Forest (southern Orange County) - 1 Saddleback Parkway, Lake Forest, CA

RSVP by emailing info@allornotatall.org or go to the Facebook page by clicking here.

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Ad Council: Wanda Sykes: That’s So Gay

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May/June, 2009: Soulforce to Visit Worst Gay-Bashing Bigot Preachers (Want to Go With?)

Here’s something you might want to check out, and maybe even participate in.

Need I mention that this is so not for my wife and me? And not just because we’re totally not-religious, either; it’s a matter of honesty — as in: We respect gay-haters who are honest with us about their homo-hatred, as opposed to the ones who wrap their fascism in the flag while carrying the cross. In short, we’d rather have the entire Fred Phelps family over to our house for a big, old-fashioned Sunday barbeque than spent three seconds in the same town as such gay-bashing Jesus-mockers as Joel Osteen, T.D. Jakes, Harry Jackson, Jr., and, of course, Rick Warren.

But Soulforce — bless their sincere, optimistic hearts — is (are?) going to attempt to open a dialogue with these and other high-profile anti-gay bigots come next spring.

Make fun of Soulforce? Are you kidding? We respect and support Soulforce unconditionally. Period.

We don’t think their plan will work, but that’s not the point. This is what Soulforce does, and we support them (along with several other organizations we admire, and cheer on, just as much: the National Black Justice Coalition, COLAGE and the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches), and we’re more than happy to spread the word about their latest effort:

The American Family Outing

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People & Their Families Create Dialogue with Six of America’s Most Influential Evangelical Leaders & Their Mega-Churches …

Between Mother’s Day Weekend and Father’s Day Weekend, 2008, diverse families from around the country will create meaningful conversations about faith, family, and LGBT people. We seek first to understand, and then to be understood, as we engage the families at six of America’s leading mega-churches. We visit these churches because we recognize the enormous influence each has within Christianity and the larger culture, through ministries, radio and television programs, and books that reach millions. We believe these churches have the potential to be a positive force in ending the physical and spiritual violence perpetuated by some religious voices against LGBT people and their families. Some of these churches have exercised inspirational leadership on social issues such as poverty and AIDS, and we believe they can exercise comparable, courageous leadership in ending spiritual and physical violence against LGBT people.

Same-gender couples with or without children, supportive straight couples and families, single-parent families, and single individuals who want to participate with a member of their extended family, are invited to apply for one or more church visits. …

Lots more at the link, including a FAQ, info on how your family can participate, etc.

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December 27, 2008

Prop 8 Supporters Launch Attack on Campaign Finance Disclosure Laws

You knew this was coming (well, I did, so I assume you did). From Robert in Monterey at Calitics:

In a remarkable column in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal right-wingers John Lott and Bradley Smith use the backlash against Prop 8 donors to suggest an end to campaign finance disclosure laws. They cite some of the more well-known examples of voter accountability for Prop 8 backers — Marjorie Christofferson, the Cinemark movie theater chain — to argue that campaign donations should be treated like a secret ballot…

This column could only be written in light of persistent media efforts to paint Yes on 8 donors as victims. By erasing the true victims — 18,000 same sex couples and the innumerable other couples who wished to follow them to full equality — folks like Steve Lopez[*] have constructed a situation where the far right can use those supposed victims as a battering ram against campaign finance disclosure rules they’ve long opposed. …

This is not just a wingnut attempt to protect their wealthy allies. It’s an effort to lay the groundwork to undermine California’s disclosure laws in the event we return to the ballot to repeal Prop 8 in the near future. Without disclosure rules, it is highly likely that we will see much larger sums of money donated to the anti-gay cause.

Even before the post-election backlash unfolded, many wealthy donors and companies refrained from donating to the Yes on 8 campaign for fear of alienating customers and Californians. If these rules are relaxed then companies that rely on same sex marriage supporters for their profits could take that money, give it to the haters, without the public knowing or being able to take their business elsewhere. It could provide their side with a significant financial advantage over ours in a future ballot campaign.

That is likely the reason behind this op-ed. Sure, they buried it on the day after Christmas, but you can be assured it’s not the last we’ll hear of this argument. We would do well to prep our own response — that the public’s right to know is sacrosanct, that if the right wants money to be equated with speech that implies disclosure, and that this is nothing but an end run around our laws to allow corporations to dominate our elections.

More, including quotes and embedded links, within the article.

* Re Lopez and more on the anti-gay bullies playing the victim, see:

Dear L.A. Times: We’re Still Not Buying the Victim Crap
December 15, 2008

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Pop Quiz: Why Should You Care About Amway’s Attempted Comeback?

Humor me, and let me know why you think I’d be so interested in this article about direct-seller/pyramid-company Amway-cum-Quixtar — and why I think you should be just as interested by it, when it apparently has nothing to do with gayosity:

Hint: The reason has nothing to do with the company’s “legal and regulatory problems” or Canadian fraud conviction.

So, who knows, without even Googling, what the anti-gay angle (oops! there’s another hint!) is re Amway, and why you should be afraid — be very afraid — if Amway manages to regain its foothold?

Feel free to use charts, videos, interpretive dance…

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Saturday, December 27, 2008: Richmond Candlelight Vigil for Lesbian Rape Victim

Email forward (passed along by the woman who gave us the daily updates on the Oakland Prop 8 protests in October; i.e.: I trust the messenger):

hello supporters -

we have contacted the Richmond Police Department and have requested their support. we hope to have one patrol car at the scene. they are working on it. meantime, we ask that people carpool for both respect for the neighborhood and for safety.

we will be gathering outside of Hand to Hand (www.handtohandkajukenbo.com) at 5680 San Pablo Ave in Oakland at 8:45pm and leaving by 9pm if folks want to caravan.

if anyone knows local richmond residents, please let them know about this vigil -

9:30 - 10pm (1/2 hour vigil).
1500 Visalia Ave, richmond, ca
saturday night dec 27th.

don’t forget a candle and matches/lighter.

Backstory:

Richmond Lesbian Gang-Raped for 45 Minutes, December 20, 2008

How to Support Lesbian Gang-Raped in Richmond, December 26, 2008

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It’s a Rare Day I Recommend You Read a DU Thread Because It’s Really Good (And Not an Example of Humankind at Its Worst)

Lately, when I haven’t been able to stand looking at even one more record in the upcoming Prop 8 database, I’ve been lurking off and on at Democratic Underground, watching the latest meltdown — and this one, over Rick Warren, is a doozy. Dubya-Dubya-Three. Horrifying, even by DU standards.

Yet amidst all the stupid, mindless, insensitive, pigheaded, ignorant, mean-spirited, decidedly un-progressive posts that begin with “I’m all for gay rights, BUT…” (take your pick) “…the country isn’t ready yet / you’re making too big a deal over a two-minute prayer / you’re just anti-Obama / this is all just part of Obama’s master plane / gay anger is out of proportion/over-the-top / I’m tired of hearing you whine about your rights / GET OVER IT ALREADY!” is one lone thread that rises high above the muck, begun by RandomKoolZip, a guy I’ve always liked and respected, who has outdone himself this time.

I’m recommending you read at least his opening post (if not the entire thread, as it’s a long one, but it’s worth it to see RKZ’s replies to the usual band of suspects over at DU who wear their deliberate ignorance like a badge of honor). For us LGBTs, it’s both comforting and encouraging to know there is sanity out there, and support for the right reasons. For straight folks who are still mystified by our anger, there’s no better explanation (and from a straight guy who really gets it). Enjoy:

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December 26, 2008

How to Support Lesbian Gang-Raped in Richmond

Backstory:
Richmond Lesbian Gang-Raped for 45 Minutes, December 20, 2008

It’s going to be harder to scrape it together this time (not because we spent a ton of money for Christmas — we really didn’t spend anything, even for each other — but because, like every other online retailer, my sales are in the basement right now), but we are definitely going to contribute what we can, as soon as my wife gets home with the checkbook (I hate writing checks).

If you’re on the fence about donating, especially during such lean times, ask yourself if doing something, anything, for one of your sisters, who may never recover psychically/emotionally from this trauma, isn’t more important than making a donation to stopping Proposition 8. To us, it is:

Support Pours In For
Richmond Gang Rape Victim

Since news broke of what police are calling a hate crime in which a lesbian Richmond resident was brutally gang raped over the weekend, Richmond police have received dozens of calls from people wanting to help, police Lt. Mark Gagan said Tuesday.

“Most of the calls were just people expressing concern for the victim and wanting to help financially,” he said.

Some callers have provided tips in the case but nothing yet that has produced an arrest, Gagan said.

The response has been so strong that police and the local group Community Violence Solutions, which assists rape victims and others, have set up an account for the victim.

“This particular case has sparked people’s compassion,” said Rhonda James, executive director of Community Violence Solutions.

People wanting to contribute can send a check made out to Community Violence Solutions to 2101 Van Ness St., San Pablo, Calif., 94806. Donors should write “Richmond Jane Doe” on the check in the memo space.

Those donations will go toward helping the victim.

“We’ll make sure 100 percent goes right to her,” James said.

Police are separately offering a reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible. The reward total has reached more than $11,000, Gagan said. …

More at the link, including updated descriptions of the four assailants, and whom to call if you have information.

I’m still looking for a contact at the Richmond PD handling donations to the reward fund; if you have an address or know who the point man/woman is, please comment.

In the meantime, the site for Community Violence Solutions is: http://cvsolutions.org/.

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