This issue is so red-hot that it is with some trepidation that I am even writing about it. But I am doing so with the intention of trying to understand and to contribute to a wider understanding of what we can do in the future.
I am a message specialist, so I want to start with the conceptual framework of the movement, which has positioned this initiative as "marriage." I do not fully understand why the GLBT movement has pursued marriage initiatives instead of civil unions. I'm sure this has been argued, but I have not seen the various positions and so do not know how the notion of marriage was adopted. I would appreciate it if those of you who have knowledge of this discussion would share it with me so I can understand it more fully.
I say this because, as a secular liberal, I wish the government would get the hell out of the marriage business altogether for everyone, gays and straights alike. There are two aspects to "marriage." The legal aspect requires couples to get a marriage license and the presider over the ceremony to sign it. The religious aspect requires a denominational ceremony and often additional paperwork and signings. Once the word "marriage" is invoked, the entire panoply of ecclesiastical fellowship and dogmatism follows.
It seems to me that GLBT folks would do us all a favor to separate these two aspects and enable straight people to enter civil unions. And then to work for legislation that equalizes the legal implications of "marriage" and "civil union." I believe we would all be better off with this separation.
From a political point of view, the term "civil union" does not carry the emotional connotation of marriage, which was exploited with great effect by the anti Prop 8 forces. Imagine the same commercials with civil union..."Civil union should be between one man and one woman." -- not much of a ring to me.
The Prop 8 ads that said (paraphrasing) "Don't let existing rights be taken away" were strikingly ineffective, in my view. This election involved significant cognition on the part of the electorate. On the whole, emotionally-based message appeals did not work for anyone. People listened and thought and they rejected attacks ads and messages that didn't fully reveal their intent.
I don't think people believed that gay people had the right to marry. This right had only taken effect for a matter of a few months, and few people even knew that. To the extent they did know about it, they didn't like it because they don't understand marriage as a civil rights issue to begin with. So I believed that the claim of "taking a right away" rang false because the right itself had not been well-established in the mind of the public.
Nor did the Prop 8 campaign take into consideration one fear that religious people have about gay marriage; to wit, if people of the same sex can marry, why would the logical objection to multiple spousal marriage be, polygamy and polygyny? This issue did not get much airplay, but I know it is a concern of some religious people.
I think that the GLBT civil rights movement needs to conduct focus groups among voter segments, then fairly large-scale surveys to understand how to enlarge different groups' "latitude of acceptance" and reduce their "latitude of rejection." In short, I think that this effort requires a step-by-step process to change attitudes over time.
One step towards fostering this change is to begin to educate people about the increasing separation of marriage from the biology of conception. Birth control and new methods of conception, such as in vitro procedures, are gradually eroding the meaning of couples' electing to share their lives: It is no longer tied to conceiving, bearing, and raising children.
People are free to spend their lives with the person(s) they love, not just stay together in order to have a family. This change has been occurring for some time and will continue, particularly as science offers more and more options for conception and preventing it.
This is one direction that long-term education can take to underpin future electoral initiatives. On the other hand, we can just wait until more of the morons die out and people more amenable to reality correction become an ever-larger majority...(hopefully).