I’m sorry for the backward positions in your and other red states. We’re trying here to help you guys out, so maybe a little more, “go get ‘em and thanks for what you all are doing” would be appropriate.

Are you saying that the campaign for full marriage equality in California somehow causes civil union laws to not pass in red states? I beg to differ, the events of the last few weeks should help immensely in that regard, in red states.

The first it that everyone either gets married, or everyone is in a civil union or a civil partnership. What we should aim for is one law for everyone without any separate but equal bullshit. There is nothing about GLBT relationships that merits a separate, second class status. Only bigots think we’re inferior.

The second flows from the first. If everyone is partnered the same way in civil ceremonies that grant the same rights to everyone, all 1200 or so rights and privileges of marriage, then there is no argument. Right now only a few of those rights are granted by states offering civil unions or partnerships: all the rest are excluded by Clintons DOMA.

Short of that we’ll keep fighting, even people like me who are perfectly content “living in sin” like Mr. Smith. Those willing to accept a second class status can continue to do so as long as they don’t get in our way.

I propose BASQUEPHOBIA.

The left’s audience constantly grows with every move He makes to the right on the recession/depression, the war and by pandering to bigots. All that hope, will, in time turn to rage.

The Gay Numbers imagines that his whimpering about the lefts criticisms of Obama will make it go away. No chance. So give it a rest.

The Gay Numbers supports a right wing candidate/president because The Gay Numbers is a right winger too.

That said, I take from your critiques (and of course, my own!) that we still lack the institutions that are equal to this task. The lawyers, lobbyists and executive directors of community centers who ran the campaign are undoubtedly good, smart people. They win lots of legal cases and pass legislation for us here in California all the time. They raise money pretty darned well. But they aren’t politicians, and contesting elections is not among their own core competencies. They hired folks who do that, but I wonder if we don’t need a more specific sort of institution that can take on this particular task as its core mission. Could we support such a group? Do we have enough work for them? Could we move its resources from state to state as ballot initiatives demand it or would our local egos and differing political cultures make that impossible?

We are still at it, and we are do NOT plan to carry Jean’s or Kor’s water for them. Simply put, we know better, and are mobilzing for 2010 (just in case). We are increasing outreach to people of color, women, and straight allies, because the Campaign failed to do so, and still apparently fail to acknowledge their dropping the ball on this.

We’re looking for folks who want to work at the grassroots level via interpersonal outreach, technology and fundraising. We meet weekly, either in general session or committees. Interested folks can contact us at http://www.lovehonorcherish.org (the website is being retooled, it was robust for the campaign, and is now under re-construction, but the contact information for interested people is checked regularly).

I too was frustrated by my experience volunteering for No on 8. It didn’t seem that they had much use for volunteers, other than phone banking, and I sucked at phone banking!
I just can’t telemarket. I tried. I seem to be a magnet for cranky old folks who get enraged by interruptions during dinner. When a rare person didn’t hang up on me, I got lost in those scripts. The campaign folks were walking around to make sure we were following them word for word!

That’s why I tried to get the campaign to let me go door-to-door in my neighborhood, which is the most conservative part of San Francisco. I prefer face-to-face conversations. I am from Chicago, where we have a long tradition of taking a precinct list and going door to door talking to registered voters. It’s painfully slow, but it can work if you get enough people to take precincts and work the list. You talk to everyone. You check them off the list. You don’t waste time on people who can’t vote. You personally ask for votes. I thought that might be helpful in my neighborhood because the people here know me and might be swayed by neighbors explaining why this mattered to them.

The No on 8 staff told me they didn’t want people doing that. They told me they couldn’t give me a list of voters in my precinct, and the board of elections staff here in SF said they wouldn’t give me a voter list if I didn’t have written “permission” from the campaign. I did my door-to-door campaign anyway without a voter list. My lover and I just went from house to house, asking folks not to take away our right to get married. It was a great excuse to talk to my neighbors, and even though I know we didn’t have much impact on the outcome, I’m hoping we turned a few votes. At the least, I know we clarified what a “No” vote meant for a few supporters of gay marriage.

I also donated money to the official campaign and volunteered to be a team captain on election day. The volunteer work they had me do seemed kinda silly. They put my group on a street corner with a bunch of signs and made us wave to drivers all day. I felt like some sort of gay rights clown, trying to get people to honk, getting flipped off and generally wasting time.

While it was frustrating that the No on 8 campaign was so opposed to this sort of campaigning, I do think my experience and those expressed here show that some of us are willing to do old-fashioned campaigning. I know it’s no replacement for a sophisticated media campaign and tons of mail/TV, but we volunteers are here for the asking.

I am glad for you that you feel comfortable in the valley. Bravo. I am going to go out on a limb and say I could guess the demographic you represent.

However, To answer your question, No I no longer live in CA. My family does, I left.
said, I was also not speaking for all of CA, just the Central Valley at large. You have yet to point out a single thing that you found so insulting.
Finally, there is nothing insulting or inflammatory in what I said

Leland… She did better than any one of us really. She got thousands of people in all 50 states to have a demonstration in less than 5 days. When was the last time that was done nationally? I would say that is an accomplishment. Second, we will win nothing but protesting our enemies. We aren’t trying to change their minds. We are trying to convince Americans of all demographics to join our cause and call for equality in all things that most Americans have. We should not be the angry gay at the temple gate. We must come out as the neighbor next door who shares the same street with them, worries about their savings and bills, provides for their kids, and pursues a good job and life. That is not sugar coating it that is the true reality. We happen to just have “a twist of lime in our cocktail” as Coco Peru might say. In the end we have a legal framework to navigate to protect our families that mounts up to a huge financial burden or if not pursued a potential legal nightmare if things don’t work out. We must stress economic security and our common belief in American values of family, home, and the pursuit of happiness that all Americans seek to employ. Anger will only have a potential supporter turn teh TV off and say “Damn gays.” An urgent conversation with real gay faces set in real life settings outside West Hollywood is what is needed to rally straights to our cause not because we are different but because we are the same.

1. First and foremost, I went to the streets of West Hollywood to recruit volunteers and the reception from people was none too pleasing. Some of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters hadn’t even heard of Prop 8 (October)

2. When I would volunteer, I was keeping close tabs on what Yes on 8 was doing and I felt we should not only match what they were doing but do more. When I would suggest these things, I would ALWAYS hear, “That’s not our focus.”

3. I have to admit that it felt to me and many others that the No on 8 side was too busy preaching to the choir rather than talking about our issues and why marriage equality is important. I lost a lover in a car accident. I know first hand why it is important but again the No on 8 people didn’t want to hear about it.

4. We were given specific scripts when we went to phone bank. We were given a list of numbers and instructions that our goal was NOT to convince people to vote no on 8 but to identify voters on a number scale;
1. Voting No on 8 and financial support to No on 8
2. Voting no on 8
3. Undecided
4. Voting Yes on 8
5. Voting yes on 8 and supports their campaign

We were doing this to identify 300,000 no voters. We knew from the start this issue is completely different and divides many families and normally reasonable people were voting yes on 8. There was no undecided margin that could have been even close to accurate. This went through October when, in my opinion, we should have been talking to people face to face rather than calling them on the phone. (Which people from No on 8 said wasn’t important)

http://www.bilerico.com/2008/1.....defeat.php

Most of what they ‘give’ us, from Clinton’s bigoted DOMA and DADT to Obama’s bigoted agreement with the essence of what Yes on 8 said, that we’re not human enough to deserve the right to marry has been one exercise in throwing us under the bus after another. When we get real laws with real teeth the Chamber of Commerce uses sellouts like Barney Frank and his henchmen to gut them.

If you don’t want to read my comments and find the idea of leaving your political closet too scary to contemplate that’s OK by me. Barney Frank Democrats and Benedict Arnold Republicans have been politically neutered for far too long to be of any value in building the kind of grass roots, democratically run mass action movement that we’ll need to compel acceptance of our agenda.

The self-appointed misleaders of No on 8 came from the ranks of the Democratic (sic) Party and movement bureaucracies and brought all that baggage with them. Their perspective was so hemmed in by party loyalty that they were unable to take on the key question that torpedoed all our efforts, the consistent and open bigotry of Obama and McCain

I knew we were screwed about 3 or 4 am on the 5th when I saw the returns from LA county – we were upside down by half a million votes. I’ve worked to defeat several of these right wing initiatives beginning with the Briggs Initiative in 1978 and the magnitude of our loss focused my previous criticisms of No on 8. Until then I’d pushed for a large dedicated effort to target African Americans, Latinos, Asians and Pacific Islanders and a major door to door leafleting campaign

But now I realize that the worst errors of the No on 8 leadership were political and that their myriad tactical and technical errors flow from that.

First, they were self appointed and had no democratic internal life and no consensus. Top down organizations are notorious for being clueless about the reality on the ground.

Secondly, their allegiance to the Democrats distorted and finally trumped their allegiance to GLBT equality.

Third, they were Eurocentric and in a state like California where ‘minorities’ are the majority, that proved fatal. (1)

Fourth, and critically, they did nothing to defuse the bigot bombs that Obama and his campaign constantly lobbed at us.

Obama’s campaign opened with the revival meetings across the South featuring christer hustlers like MaryMary and ex-gay Donnie McClurkin and it continued in that vein until the day He tossed the bomb that ended our chances of winning. AP reported it thus:

“Both men said marriage is a union between a man and a woman. Obama added that he supports civil unions for gay partners, which would give them rights such as hospital visits with one another. He said he opposed a constitutional ban on gay marriage, calling the matter a state issue.”

When Obama’s assertion that “god’s in the mix” exploded in the headlines it gave the bigots the green light to trample our rights and the rest is history. No on 8 never challenged Obama’s bigotry and their silence about Obama’s open bigotry lost the election.

The solution is clear. And it will unfold as Obama’s right centrist government utterly fails to contain the economic collapse they helped cause and as he continues the mass murder of muslims from Palestine to Pakistan. That will deepen the mass radicalization begun in response to Bush. Our response will succeed only the extent what we succeed in building a movement that embraces a cutting edge approach, independent of the Democrats, with a democratic internal life and a mass action approach.

Nothing else will do.

(1) California’s DMV has teaching materials and does testing in Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Cambodian, Chinese, Croatian, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Persian/Farsi, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Samoan, Spanish, Tagalog/Filipino, Thai, Tongan, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

If I had run the campaign, I would have exploited those facts and used the same type of distortions and misleading arguments that they used against us.

For example a commercial showing images of the mormon polygimist cult in Texas having their children removed with the voiceover “Why are these people trying to lecture Californians about marriage?” and plenty of images of those Hot mormon babes with braided hair. Or “why are these people coming into California trying to force their views on our state”

The other side will fight to the death and use any avenue they can, however immoral or deceitful. Time to fight fire with fire. We were soft and they kicked our ass.

Anyway– i tried to log on to tonite’s “town-hall”, but the system didn’t seem to like my mac and wouldn’t let me on. Did anyone resign?

Sure it needs strategy and money, but those are all the result of work.

Next time, it’s got to be about everyone doing everything they can.

The Prop 8 campaign has turned what we used to call “straight allies” into straight fighters in their own right. The cause has crossed over, and we need them.

Nite folks.

He’s the best. But I know Mark well enough to know he will give enormous credit to EQCA for the critical role they played also.

– we set up a ballot measure committee so we could raise funds locally. We gave it a local name so the local media would would consider us for coverage. 99% of our funds raised went direct to No on 8.
– we looked at how much our county needed to raise to play our part in getting the statewide total to a $20 million budget (our estimate of the fundraising goal from in-state donors). We set a goal of $420k for our county.
– we built a database of potential donors – one name at a time – from lists of Obama and other democratic donors in the county
– we recruited “honorary co-chairs” for the local No-on-8 committee — people in faith communities, business leaders, electeds, locally famous people, minority community leaders — anyone who would lend their name to the cause
– we built a team of volunteers to run our campaign locally.
– we generated 25+ local stories in the press and on tv/radio (earned media).
– we held three fundraisers, at various price points so that the entire community could attend one or more. This turned co-chairs into donors.
– we did personal asks of several potential big donors, all straight by the way.
– we operated phonebanks in two cities, one starting in July, three times a week.
– we donated a field office to the campaign and staffed it with near full-time volunteers.
– we set a vote improvement goal (over 2000) of 12 points. (If every county got this much improvement, we would win).
– we planned visibility actions and election day activities. This turned co-chairs into sidewalk activists.
– we beat the fundraising goal countywide — $485k vs. $420k.
– we beat our vote improvement goal 13 points vs. 12 (statewide was 9).
– we won the county 2-1.
– we changed the community.
– we woke up on November 5 disappointed, but knowing we did our part.

Here are the facts we aleady know. They were warned multiple times about the way the campaign was going. They knew this was coming for years. They waited until the last minute to raise funds on par with Yes on 8. There are actually more.

I will say what one of my friends recently said of the automotive excutives going to Congress to beg for money now. I had originally said I think its good Congress is asking for a business plan. He said to me “What difference is a business plan going to make with people who already know can not do their job right. They should be fired. Anyone else in their organizational chain would be given their performance.”

That’s how I look at this situation. They did a crap job. So they got to go. Give someone else who knows who to get things done their chance. The time we are wasting trying to prop up failures is the time we could be spending on people who are going to achieve something.

I don’t know that it’s that simple, yeah a lot of things happened that led to the place we are now, and yeah there were definitely things that could have been done differently on many fronts.

The one thing I will say is that when our opponents want something done they all get in ‘line’ and speak with one voice and act accordingly.

I hope that we can learn at least that much, because once we divide and start infighting then we are sure to lose the good fight.