Did the election of 2004 show that Americans are against gay rights? After traveling to Oregon and spending ten days volunteering with the effort to defeat that state’s constitutional amendment limiting marriage to one man and one woman, I’ll say it: no, they’re not. They’re not against gay rights, and most of them aren’t even against gay marriage. Uncomfortable with it, find it hard to discuss with their family members, and often have little information on precisely what civil marriage actually entails (even though many of them have entered or want to enter into it). Yes, the No on Constitutional Amendment 36 campaign lost, as most people thoroughly expected. And although the margin (57 to 43 percent) was closer than in any of the ten other states where voters have just decided to alter their states’ founding documents so as to make people like me second-class citizens in perpetuity, it still hurts. And most of all, Bush won.
But was this election decided by evangelicals who are driven to vote on ballot measures—on homosexuality in Ohio, on abortion in Florida this year---and then cast an “incidental” vote for Bush? Or, rather, since strongly held religious-right views on these social issues do not make up anywhere near a majority of voters in any swing state, is it possible we’ve got a job. Our base is about a quarter of the electorate. Their base is about a quarter of the electorate. And we’ve just got to talk to all
those people in the middle.
In Oregon, I dialed at least fifteen hundred phone numbers, knocked on several hundred doors, and talked to a huge number of voters who know and care about gay people and yet are deeply ambivalent, confused, and ill-informed about gay marriage.
For this reason, in the battle to define the marriage debate, key Democratic allies ceded too much ground and gave up on too many people before the conversation even started. Even Barney Frank has joined the chorus of Democrats complaining that we gays just moved too fast and the country wasn't ready. It's too late now. Now is not the time to question whether we should demand equality. Now is the time to fight for equality and social justice harder than ever.
In Oregon – GLBT movement leaders are not emphasizing this, but it’s a fact – our supposed friends left us high and dry. The state AFL-CIO, which has been a critical ally on past gay rights issues, did not take a position on the constitutional amendment, largely for fear of alienating Kerry voters. Nike (based on suburban Beaverton), which had been a key financial backer of efforts to defeat past antigay ballot measures in the state, refused to contribute any money this time around, again for fear that gay marriage is an issue that will hurt them. Consequently, the queer movement had to spend a lot of energy on more protracted struggles to raise smaller chunks of money elsewhere.
Evangelical Christians, no matter how energetic they are about showing up at the polls, simply aren’t anywhere near a majority of voters. They just aren’t. Not in Ohio, not in Florida, and not in America. Most voters (1) do support benefits and protections for gay couples, (2) are uncomfortable with the idea of “gay marriage,” and (3) don't have any clear conception of how the two might be related or why gay people even WANT to get married. Because they have failed to admit the significance of these complex realities, the Democratic leadership that’s now busy selling out their base is not only gutless – they’re also stupid. The Democrats are just going to have to suck it up and do the hard work of explaining what the gay marriage issue is about instead of infantilizing them and assuming that they somehow will never wrap their minds around the idea that inequality hurts people. Gays and lesbians are trying to do this work, but the fact is, we’re a minority, and we can’t do it alone. Gays did not “cost” the Democrats the election, but the Democrats did give up on us when it mattered.
I think the vast majority of Americans simply don’t understand what’s at stake in the gay marriage debate. There’s now broad majority support in this country for all kinds of rights and protections for gays and their families that were considered a pipe dream just ten years ago. Most Americans have gay friends and relatives that they know and like; most support benefits and protections for gay couples; and many straight Americans are aware of some of the inequities that their gay friends and relatives face. Yes, most are uncomfortable with gay marriage. Not dead-set against it, not obsessed with it, not likely to have spent all that much time thinking about it, but uncomfortable. They think it’s weird. To a really, really stunning extent, they actually have no idea what civil marriage is, what effects these amendments will have, or why gay people want to get married. On all three questions, the more Americans learn, the more they support us.
Civil unions and other legislation that provides benefits and protections to same-sex couples now have majority support nationwide. In California, home to one in Americans, partnership protections in realms such as child custody, legal disputes, housing protections, bereavement leaves and other state benefits will become the law of the land on January 1, and that state's Republican governor has recently signed a bill requiring insurance companies to provide coverage to registered domestic partners. Even President Bush embraced civil unions in the final days of the campaign in a desperate attempt to jettison his extremist image.
One of my fellow volunteers literally had to explain to an Oregon voter that a no vote on the constitutional amendment would not jeopardize the legal recognition of her own heterosexual marriage. Tellingly, the other side’s campaign resorted to lies, many of which are less plausible to voters than they once would have been. The Yes on 36 campaign’s website stated that the ultimate purpose of “most gay leaders” trying to win marriage equality is in fact to “destroy” and “abolish” “the family.” In the last week of the election, they sent out a mass mailing of fliers showing a blond little girl on the cover, with the headline, “The classroom will never be the same”; inside, voters were told that if the amendment were not passed, “the details of gay sex” would be taught in Oregon’s public schools. The public schools superintendent issued a statement condemning the flier, but of course it was no use.
We can’t possibly win this fight without the full support of our allies, and that means that supposedly pro-gay unions and pro-gay companies are going to have to do their part. The problem we face is not that most Americans are fundamentalist bigots. As I have said, it’s just not true. The problem we face is that they are successfully bringing on board those too many basically decent people who, this year, voted to ban gay marriage, and who by and large didn’t know what they were voting for.
-----
It’s hard to predict how any individual will feel about gay marriage, but it’s important to find out. The most important thing was to try to meet the voter wherever they are. In ten days in Oregon, I dialed probably fifteen hundred phone numbers and knocked on several hundred doors. I learned how to elicit, from undecided voters and those who said they planned to vote yes, their own feelings about the issue, in order to respond to them accurately and reassuringly. I became familiar with the typical range of concerns that undecided voters voice when asked about the amendment – concerns about their children, concerns about their faith, and concerns about the wisdom of overturning what typically seem to them to be thousands of years of tradition. I learned to provide answers that had proven effective in focus groups and that, I found, indeed worked time and time again. I learned to say “unequal treatment” instead of “discrimination” because undecided voters had not responded well to the word “discrimination” applied to the status of gay people under marriage laws.
I talked to voters in and around Oregon’s largest city, ranging from lily-white Beaverton, where Nike has its headquarters, to poor black neighborhoods in northeast Portland. The campaign concentrated on this population-dense base of support for gay rights, on the theory that potential supporters were concentrated here and that it was important to turn out that base. Everywhere I went, there was a minority of people who were firmly opposed to gay marriage. Many of them give religious reasons for their views – though, very importantly, not all. The No on 36 campaign, then, targeted the large number of voters who were undecided or who had not spent much time thinking about the issue.
I heard every imaginable response from the voters I talked to. Three or four people said things that I found startling and difficult to hear. One man told me, at his front door, that homosexuals who try to get married should go to jail. Another man, when I identified myself on the phone as a volunteer for No on Constitutional Amendment 36 (and we were told always to call it Constitutional Amendment 36, not Measure 36, lest the voter miss the profundity and unalterability of what she was contemplating), said, “Why don’t you go suck some cock?” And on election eve, standing and waving signs at one end of one of Portland’s busiest bridges, there was about one hostile gesture for every twenty honks, smiles, or thumbs-up signs; one guy rolled down his window and said, “You’re gay - fuck you!” (My quick-thinking fellow volunteer, who recently lost his job in New York and had devoted a month to the campaign, shouted back in a tone of utter serenity, “God bless!”)
Those were the absolute worst moments, and they were more than made up for by the scores of deeply touching conversations I had with, with the people who got new information or a new perspective from talking to me. And I can’t pretend it was a one-way exchange – I also learned a lot about where they are and how they perceive homosexuality. I learned to respect their concerns, to repeat them back, and if things went reasonably well, to clinch the deal: “It sounds like you might be thinking about voting No on Constitutional Amendment 36. Can I count on you to vote no?” Canvassing is simply the best way to persuade people - better than TV or radio advertising - because you can elicit, and then respond to, the person's specific concerns. That is, some people are mainly concerned about what will happen to churches, others about their kids and whether or not they will turn out to be gay, and many others have incoherent and often incorrect beliefs about the consequences of passing or defeating the amendment. Voters are confused, and many of them don’t have regular contact with good information.
-----
We have to give people room to admit that they’re uncomfortable with gay marriage. I can’t tell you how much mileage I got from this insight. Simply saying to a voter, in a compassionate tone, “A lot of people are uncomfortable with gay marriage,” gets you off on the right foot. And even more importantly, it’s accurate. We have to be honest if we’re going to win. One thing I found was that many, many people think that gay couples "should" have all the rights that straight couples do, and yet they believe, in some sense or another, that marriage really “should” be only between a man and a woman. They don’t really connect these two “shoulds.” One of my favorite No on 36 TV spots, called "Unsure," began with an African American man saying, "I'll say it - I'm not sure about gay marriage." I think it’s crucial not to loathe or condescend to such folks, because they represent the new vital center that we have to construct. It's OK, it's more than OK, to be uncomfortable with gay marriage – and in fact, if we are fully honest, we must also admit that not all gay people want to get married, and that many gay people are just as surprised as straight people are that this issue has burst onto the political landscape. That admission needs to be the foundation for building common ground – for example, to advance the idea that, since it’s confusing, it's probably not a good idea to put unequal treatment in the state constitution.
What is it like to persuade a voter, a classmate, or a relative? Each conversation simply must take its own course. I had one 18-year-old registered independent come to the door at a house in suburban Beaverton; when I asked him if he would “vote no on Constitutional Amendment 36 to stop the ban on gay marriage,” he said very earnestly that he hoped I wouldn't be offended, but that he was planning to vote Yes. He volunteered that he thought gay couples should have all the same rights that straight couples do, but that it shouldn't be called "marriage." Thinking back to my training on how to reach voters with this particular set of feelings, I said, "it sounds like you support civil unions, then," and he said that yes, he definitely did. Then I explained that “we” don't actually have civil unions in Oregon (no need to bring up the fact that I was “new to the area”), that there is no sign that the legislature will create them, and that a constitutional amendment creates a legal precedent that could be used to uphold unequal treatment in future legal disputes. He listened intently. I did not get this voter to say that he would vote no, but he did say that he'd heard new information from me, and I am quite confident that he thought more about the issue afterward. I left him with our literature.
Reaching an undecided or ambivalent voter and conversing with him or her, sometimes for ten or fifteen minutes or even longer, was incredibly inspiring and really not very hard, although I certainly became much more skilled at it over time. The strongest thing we have going for us is that most people don’t have a very clear idea of what marriage is, and are interested in learning more. Many, many young married heterosexuals today know and care about gay friends and relatives and their partners (even if they say they don’t necessarily “approve” of “it”); some have even become quite conscious of the vast web of protections and obligations that they enjoy as married people, and truly want access to those protections to be distributed equally. Many more are really almost embarrassed at how little they understand about this institution that in all likelihood they have either entered into, or else sincerely hope to enter into.
One woman that I reached from a call list (we focused on calling Democratic and independent women over 35, who had been identified as a critical undecided population) told me she was glad I had called because she had not had an opportunity to hear a gay person’s perspective on the amendment. I learned to bite my tongue at complicated moments like this one: I had to suppress the urge to chide her for assuming I was gay or that there could be a single gay perspective (and in fact we had tons of amazing and deeply committed straight volunteers), but I knew that by far the more productive thing to do was to provide her with what she had quite honestly said she wanted, and what at the end of the day I wanted too – a conversation about what this issue means to me.
Many people who did say they were voting for the amendment also said that they had had some doubts because they did have a gay cousin, they really liked their daughter’s gay friend, and so on. Clearly, many straight people know much more about gay people and gay couples than they did ten years ago. Straight people under thirty are vastly more likely than the rest of the electorate to support gay marriage, and to have close friends who are openly gay. And people increasingly know and accept the partners of their gay relatives, and in some cases they are even beginning to talk to them about gay rights, which was almost impossible to imagine on any significant scale just a few years ago.
-----
The gay marriage debate is not a referendum on the Bible, the family, or whether or not homosexuality is immoral. Those questions simply aren’t what’s on the ballot when a marriage amendment is proposed, and we must persuade people of this point. What’s on the ballot is whether the right to marry is limited to straight people. If a person has a core belief that homosexuality is immoral, or that marriage exists for procreation, I found it was most effective to avoid prolonged discussion of this belief, and to try to steer the conversation toward other areas – for example, to the fact that this had nothing to do with school curriculums (as the opposition claimed), to actual gay people’s actual experiences, and to the point that “while we may disagree about social issues such as marriage, we probably shouldn't put that disagreement in the state constitution.”
We can’t give up on people before we even have the conversation, though, which is what the Democrats, as a party, have done - especially with its most loyal and devoted constituency, African Americans. In African Americans who answered the door, I thought, were more likely to call their (opposite-sex) spouse or other members of the household to talk to me as well, and if they were at all supportive (as most were), were more likely to feel strongly about it. I also have been quite impressed by the number of young straight married couples who just plain think it’s wrong that we can’t get married, and who are learning, from this controversy, more about what their own marriages mean to them.
These things seem clear to me: the more people learn about the issue, the less likely they are to want to ban gay marriage; that many married straight people, especially young ones, are increasingly aware of the rights, both everyday and crisis-related, that they take for granted; there's increasingly overwhelming support for civil unions at least; that people under 30 typically have no problem with gay marriage and are far, far more likely than older people to be comfortable with gay people and find antigay opinions unacceptable; that it matters whether or not people think homosexuality is a choice; and that people very explicitly connect questions of gay rights to actual gay people in their own families. Many people have nieces, nephews, in-laws, or co-workers whom they mentioned – or their child has a friend who has gay or lesbians parents whom they have met and like. The way in which that has played out, as more and more people have come out to their families, is pretty interesting. It creates a different dynamic from when whites vote on black civil rights, since most white Americans only know blacks as friends or coworkers, not family members. Among young people, things look amazingly good. Shouting matches and near-disturbances were reported in the campus paper when Yes on 36 volunteers set up a table at Portland State University. A huge proportion of the people who volunteered to canvass, especially close to election day, were students at public and private universities, community colleges, liberal arts schools, and even high schools.
One woman, on the phone, told me she was “in a long-term heterosexual relationship” and said, “I had several close friends who died.” (“In the 1980s?” I asked, invoking the catastrophe that robbed my gay generation of so many of our elders. “Yes,” she said.) She told me that one friend in particular had felt like a brother to her, and she’d spent weeks at his bedside, helping out with the quotidian needs that become so challenging for someone suffering a gruesome and mysterious illness and death. She said that before he died, her friend had told her that “that within my lifetime, I would see gay people getting married – it would become a reality. And I thought he was wrong at the time, but now I know that he was right.”
-----
The more people know about us, the more they support us. Time and time again, it became clear to me that voters on both sides of the issue very explicitly weighed the amendment in relation to openly gay friends, and especially to gay people in their own families. Many people are very deeply ambivalent, even if they voted to amend the constitution; one woman, for instance, told me both that she believed homosexuality was immoral and that she thought it was wrong that her gay cousin, who has had the same partner since she was three years old, couldn’t get health insurance through that partner’s job.
The trickiest thing I learned was when to bite my tongue. The training on this point was excellent. Undecided voters clearly don’t think like me, and as I’ve said, it was important to establish something about how they DO think and address their concerns honestly and respectfully, no matter how totally silly they might seem. We sucked it up and said “gay marriage,” not “same-sex marriage,” because it was a more familiar phrase to most voters. If someone said they were worried that their kid would turn out to be gay, I didn’t try to persuade them that would actually be an OK thing – but instead to focus on the fact that this amendment really didn’t have anything to do with whether that was going to happen. This line of argument is right not only strategically but also in a very logical sense: I truly know very little about this person’s life, I don’t have time to learn very much about it, I don’t know their inner hopes and fears, and it’s plainly a lot more likely that I can persuade them in three or four minutes about how to cast their vote than I can about something they perceive as momentous, troubling, and personally fraught.
Even whether gays make good parents - as passionately as I feel about the matter – seemed like a less promising topic of discussion than the comparatively much easier-to-establish facts that gay parents exist and would be adversely affected by the amendment. If someone said they were worried that their kid would turn out to be gay, I did not I did not try to discuss my own interpretation of the Bible or the fact that Jesus didn’t say one word about gay marriage; rather, I tried to get the voter to understand, as quickly as possible, the fact that there were real people who would be hurt by this amendment. Only once, in a conversation in which I wasn’t getting anywhere, did I bring up with a voter the historical analogy of interracial marriage – and that one time, I immediately regretted it. He simply declared that banning interracial marriage was obviously wrong because racial discrimination is wrong – and the conversation reached a dead end with a thud. And he doubtless felt he had occupied the moral high ground.
When the question of children came up, I tried to steer the conversation away from abstractions. It’s good to talk about crisis situations that a family might actually face and how antigay amendments would affect them. In fact, I should say that I suspect that hospital visitation has become our single most effective selling point in part because of the way in which the cost of health care, both routine and emergency, looms as a major daily worry for Americans. The hospital setting “primes” the voter, to use a word I learned from my political scientist brother, to judge the issue in the context of their own feelings, such as (1) their own worries about how public policy might affect them in such a circumstance, and (2) the existing political discourse that constructs having to go to the hospital as a situation in which one is likely to encounter hostile, unreasonable, and cruel bureaucracies and policies.
-----
We need to find the people who “think we should have the rights” - a surprisingly large population - and show them why that means, among other things, the right to marry. It’s really a tragedy how ill-informed people are. For example, I talked to many people who were totally unaware that civil unions do not currently exist in Oregon - or if they know it, they don’t really think about the fact that that affects the daily lives of gay people in Oregon. They almost certainly don’t know that gay activists have been trying to get them passed by the legislature for thirty years without much prospect of success. Yet even those who know very little about gay politics, when pressed, often support civil unions for long-term couples – or what they tend to refer to, rather interestingly, as “the rights” (as in, “gay people should have all the rights, but . . .”). Along these lines, the No on Constitutional Amendment 36 campaign sent mailings that listed one hundred of the rights and responsibilities that, under Oregon law, hinge on being married. Many voters, asked for their thoughts on the issue, voice still more incoherent constructions, such as “I think they should be able to visit them if they’re in the hospital but I just don’t know about gay marriage.”
One 19-year-old who saw me canvassing rolled down his window and chatted with me about his ambivalence. Eventually he allowed as how passing an amendment like this one wasn’t going to stop people from being gay, and so it didn’t make any sense to pass it. I was a bit mystified by this logic, but it was logical and I said so, and thanked him for his vote. In African American neighborhoods in northeast Portland, I spoke to many friendly individuals and couples, including a woman who said her husband “wouldn’t be living here any more” if he were to vote yes, and a man who came to the door of his dilapidated house, clearly heard what I had to say, smiled, and said to me that he had already voted and that “We’re in synch. To each his own, right?”
Once, I started a shouting match between neighbors. A woman picking up her mail had volunteered that she was against gay adoption but for gay marriage, and then asked if I was gay. She said that she had considered the matter and was going to vote no. At this point her neighbor in a shady, rundown apartment complex, who had overheard us, said in a voice dripping with mockery, “My friend wants to marry his DOG!” I said, calmly and simply but firmly, that that was not what was not on the ballot. At this point, the woman– who had expressed only lukewarm interest in the whole matter – got totally animated and yelled at the guy: “That is just total crap! This has nothing to do with that! I’m voting no!” And, turning to me, “You have my vote!”
-----
The single most perplexing conversation I had was on Election Day, over the phone, with a voter in rural, eastern Oregon, who had completed her ballot the previous evening with her husband. After we talked about gay marriage and the legal precedent that a constitutional amendment sets, she told me she wished I had called the night before. She and her husband had both voted yes, her husband had gone out of town on business, and now their ballots were sealed and ready to be dropped off. She said that if she were voting now, she would vote No on Constitutional Amendment 36.
If the ballots hadn’t been sealed, she could have nullified her vote - only on this measure - by marking No as well as Yes. With the ballots sealed, though, I could only tell her that she had the option of visiting her county elections office. Under Oregon law, a voter who makes a mistake may go there and exchange her ballot for a fresh one. I went on Mapquest and got directions to the office in the county seat; it was perhaps a twenty-minute drive from her home. I called that county elections office to find out whether there was a line, and then called her back to let her know there was none at all. She said she would think about it. She really wasn’t sure. Eventually, I must have pressed a bit too hard, because she said, “You can call me twelve times today, and I still won’t be sure what I’ll do about it.” She said she hadn’t decided whether or not she would exchange her ballot, and clearly she wanted to make that decision on her own.
It was very difficult to give up on this voter, to trust her to make her own decision. Part of me wanted to drive two or three hours to visit her in person and persuade her why she should exchange her ballot and vote No on a fresh one. I have no idea whether she did it; I’m inclined to think she probably did not. Her vote wouldn’t have defeated the amendment. I do feel confident, though, that in the future she will weigh questions relating to gay rights differently than she did when she and her husband completed their ballots early this week.
-----
We lost. But in Multnomah County, which covers central Portland and whose commissioners decided last spring that it would violate constitutional guarantees of equal protection to continue to deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples, we won by a margin of two to one.
“The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States.”
--Barack Obama, Boston, July 27, 2004
