Prop 8 - Post Mortem

It's the Neaderthals v. Mandela - who will win?

The joy and relief about the presidential election has been tempered somewhat by the adoption of Prop 8 in California, outlawing same-sex marriage. There have apparently been protests each night since then - my brother took some awesome pictures.

I feel sadness and frustration with the Neaderthals who think they deserve more rights than I. Those feelings are mixed with anger at the folks on our side who have handled this struggle so badly, in my humble opinion.

I have stopped donating to HRC or any of the other organizations working for the legalization of same sex marriage - because I believe if they had handled the issue differently we could be much further along than we are today.

I worked in the South African studies field for several years - Mandela is one of my heroes. A couple of months ago there was an article in Time Magazine about his leadership style and methods. According to the article, Mandela made decisions based solely on strategy, not principle. Apparently it worked, since he was a vital factor in his country moving from apartheid to majority rule.

If we had followed that model, we wouldn't have used the word marriage at all. We would have quietly gone after the legal and financial rights and left "marriage" out of the equation. Bad strategy has set us back even further than we were several years ago, in fact, since there are (I think) 39 states that now have laws specifically outlawing same sex marriage or stating that a marriage is only between a man and a woman.

And now Richard Kim has an article on The Nation site about how disorganization sunk the effort to stop Prop 8. Oy vey. Aren't we passed this childish approach to political organizing yet? We need to learn from the against-all-odds success of the Obama campaign. My father, who's been politically active in Democratic causes since before I was born, said the Obama campaign was the most organized he'd seen. Ever. What will it take for our organizations to move past ideology and rhetoric and start doing what works? And when will we figure out that being disorganized doesn't work?

Interestingly, a friend emailed me what he meant to be encouragement - that "it is widely believed by civil rights groups that equal rights for same sex couples is inevitable." Is that the problem? That we don't take the fight seriously - we don't think we have to be organized or fight like our lives depend on it - because we think it's inevitable? What kind of cockamamie strategy is THAT?

Electing a Democratic president certainly moves us closer to a Supreme Court that MIGHT move in the direction of true justice for us. But that's not enough. And it's certainly not going to be soon enough. I used to think equal marriage rights would happen in my life time. I don't think that anymore. That's sad enough. But to think that actions on our part have contributed to that is even more pathetic.