Evan Wolfson is author of Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People's Right to Marry (Simon & Schuster, 2004), and executive director of Freedom to Marry, the gay and non-gay partnership for marriage equality nationwide.
Once again , America is heading into an Election Day with another round of ballot-measure attacks on gay people. While a shifting mood in the electorate may give our cause a boost—and as the public begins to wise up to Karl Rove's gay-scapegoat-distraction plan—we are still likely to lose most, if not all, of the ballot measures aimed against us this year. We need to be ready to explain that loss to ourselves, our media and the public so the right-wing cannot spin these defeats into a false claim that our cause undermines candidates or other concerns we share.
At a similar juncture before the election in 2004, in a speech entitled The Scary Work of Winning, I described why we lose these battles. Most basically, civil rights movements rarely win early votes. After all, if it were as simple as a minority turning to the majority and saying, “Please stop discriminating against us,” we wouldn't need constitutions or courts. Many of these attacks are cruelly aimed at gay people in states with already beleaguered communities, underfunded infrastructure, and few if any existing legal protections—this year's wave includes Alabama, Arizona, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin.
But, as I said in 2004, the other reason we are likely to lose in some places is that we have not fully fought the fight; we have not fully engaged in the conversation necessary—sustained and to scale—to move hearts and minds. When we run campaigns that flee from describing who local gays are and why marriage matters—campaigns that fail to connect the dots between fairness and how the denial of marriage harms families and helps no one—we are not giving people what they need over enough time to move them to our side.
In The Scary Work of Winning, I laid out a several "lessons" from civil rights struggles that we need to embrace. One was what I called "losing forward," or progressing toward the long-term win. It followed the first lesson, "wins trump losses"—and I am an optimist who believes in fighting to win. But we can't always win on the enemy's timeframe, we can't win without envisioning what victory means and what it takes, and we can't win if we run from a fight.
When I push campaign leaders, activists and funders on the need to talk specifically about gays and marriage—and not run away from what the battle is really about—it is not merely to win down the road. I push this repeatedly because it is our best chance of winning, period. But I also believe that if we fail to at least lose forward, then we not only lose once, but twice, because we do not advance our cause.
So far, too many of our state campaigns—both the short-term election efforts and the longer-term public education work—fail to offer the voting public real content and an authentic engagement. Too often they have not used the airtime of an election battle to talk about gay people and marriage—the two things these ballot measures are most about—instead relying on generic appeals to fairness. Too many of our side's campaigns have chosen to emphasize collateral effects on non-gay families, as if voters will really be persuaded that what the media will always refer to as "the marriage amendment" is somehow not about gay people's freedom to marry. Worst of all, many campaigns and activists have gone with the message that people should vote the measure down simply because it is "unnecessary" or "goes too far." That subliminally suggests—unintentionally, but in a way that is still damaging to our long-term movement—that some discrimination is okay and that it would indeed be a problem if we really did have gay couples marrying.
So what should a campaign message be—both in the short-term burst of an election and, more importantly, in the conversations over time? Its core should be something like this:
Local couples such as Jane and Judy of Kenosha Falls, Wisconsin [substitute a locality in your state here], who are in love and have been together X years and are raising Y kids and caring for Judy's aging parents [paint a picture— personal, local, emotionally compelling—ideally giving the names/ages of people, including the kids] suffer real harm when excluded from marriage. Being denied marriage means that Jane and Judy don't get the legal commitment to match the personal commitment they've made in life, and thereby are denied X and Y [specify some of the tangible and intangible concomitants of marriage, to be found in my book or on the Web]. Denying them marriage does nothing to help anyone else, but it does hurt their family—that's not our Wisconsin values. Discrimination like this has no place in Wisconsin or in our constitution. And by the way, this constitutional amendment is deliberately sweeping and vague, and is intended to deny them civil unions, partnership, health benefits and more, depriving Jane, Judy and their kids of any measure of protection, large or small, for their family. That's cruel and unfair.
The campaigns should use the time to introduce non-gay people to their gay neighbors. For instance, the 2000 Census tells us 13,802 same-sex couples live in Virginia, which is surely an undercount. Of those, 17.9 percent are African-American and 29.9 percent of them are raising children, meaning there are more than 4,000 couples with kids, and, thus, thousands of Virginia children who are being harmed by the denial of marriage that undermines their families
Note the "by the way" in the message above. This may, indeed, be the part of the message that is easiest for a critical group of people to get to first. But they can't get there until we have spent enough time and given enough information in the first part of the campaign (over many months) to connect the dots to the denial of marriage. This includes diffusing or reducing the anxieties and misconceptions around marriage at least enough to get them ready to take in the "by the way" message regarding the breadth and cruelty of the "second sentence” of many of these amendments, which seek to go beyond barring same-sex couples from marriage to denying those couples, and unmarried heterosexuals, any measure of protection, large or small. This is why we need to start earlier and use time more wisely than we have in any of these battles. And campaigns—electoral or educational—that think they can make the whole conversation and vote about the "by the way" from the get-go are kidding themselves, no matter what a pollster or consultant may tell them is the easier lift.
The effort to wall us off from marriage and cement discrimination and permanent second-class citizenship into constitutions, the precious charters of freedom and national unity, is cruel and despicably un-American. The good news is that even these unfair and harsh amendments are not the last word—unless we allow them to be. As evidenced by this week's unanimous decision from the New Jersey Supreme Court opening the door to marriage equality, ours is the generation that will live to see the exclusion from marriage ended in all 50 states, if we do the work—in all 50 states, using our time wisely to do it right.
