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By Evan Wolfson: Telling the Truth

Freedom to Marry
October 11, 2006

In Rise to Fairness, I talked about why we, understandably, are losing the unfairly premature and preemptive votes that the anti-gay industry, aligned to the White House, are mounting in their ongoing state-by-state wave of assaults on constitutions. And I promised that I would use this week's Note to set forth what our side's campaign message should be in these election battles — not just to lay the groundwork for greater understanding and victory over time, but also to have even a hope of winning on the short-term election timeframe that presents a nearly insuperable challenge to a minority in the early stages of a civil rights conversation.

In visits this past week to Virginia (.mp3), where gay families are currently under attack, and Kentucky (mp3), where advocates of fairness are regrouping following the assault in 2004, I underscored the importance of using these early battles as a chance to give non-gay people the message that this is not a freebie vote on how they feel in the abstract about marriage or about gays in Massachusetts. Rather, we need to help the reachable-but-not-yet-reached understand that this question of marriage equality is about how discriminatory laws are treating couples and children right there at home in South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Wisconsin, or any other community or state. We must make our appeal to them personal (why I care enough to ask you to care), local (this is about people here who are being hurt), and persistent (I trust you're a good person and I am going to engage with you and address your concerns as you think it through), giving them the information and time to absorb it that will allow them to push past discomfort and rise to fairness.

So far, too many of our state campaigns (both the short-term election efforts and, even more important, the longer-term public education work) have failed 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," subliminally suggesting — unintentionally, but in a way that is still damaging to our long term movement — that some discrimination is okay and that if we really did have gay couples marrying here, it would indeed be a problem.

All of these avoidance messages fail to explain how the denial of marriage hurts local families, and fail to dispel people's initial anxieties and reduce their resistance enough to hear the messages that would enable them to respond to their internal conflicts in a way that could lead to a good vote. Not only do they not help people improve their understanding over time, they do not connect enough to diffuse discomfort so as to enable a win. There is no end-run around the heavy lifting we must do to change hearts and minds — and no better time to start than now.

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] are harmed when excluded from marriage because being denied marriage means they 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 hurts 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, etc., depriving Jane and Judy and their kids 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 13,802 same-sex couples that the 2000 Census (undercounting) tells us live in Virginia, 17.9% of them African-American, 29.9% of them raising children (meaning there are over 4000 couples with kids, and, thus, thousands of Virginia children 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, and diffuse or reduce anxieties or 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 amendment's "second sentence." 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 good news, as I told those on the frontlines in Kentucky and Virginia, is that even the unfair, harsh, and despicably un-American state constitutional amendments are not the last word — unless we allow them to be. Ours is the generation that will live to see the exclusion from marriage ended in all fifty states, if we do the work... in all fifty states, using time wisely to do right.