Via everyone on my friends list...

[elsmi]

...a meme: Copy this sentence into your LiveJournal if you're in a heterosexual marriage, and you don't want it "protected" by the bigots who think that gay marriage hurts it somehow.

Okay, that out of the way, I gotta say I'm also curious -- who's helping get the votes to do it?  Because here in California at least, we have the anti-marriage Prop 8

Comments

[shweta_narayan]

Yay you!

[elsmi]

No, yay you!

If you want to volunteer, make sure to sign up now -- the training is pretty quick and easy, but they're understandably reluctant to send people out there without it, and that's this weekend. (Most important instruction: "don't engage the crazy")

[dichroic]

This is their last best chance, and if they lose, that's full legal marriage in the largest -- by far -- state in the union. We win. Forever.

Not so sure about that, unfortunately. I just voted against a one-man/one-woman amendment to the Arizona state Constitution. For the *second* time.

(Here via shweta_narayan.)

[elsmi]

Sure, I don't really mean "that's it we can all go home"; maybe I can phrase that bit better. But if prop 8 goes down, that means that 1) for the 12% of the US's population that lives in CA -- that's 1 out of 8 americans -- this battle is over, and the good guys win; and 2) "as goes California, so goes the nation" -- it's one thing if Massachusetts does it, but no-one can ignore California; and it's going to make a *huge* difference in Arizona two years from now whether they have a bunch of happy marriages right next door, don't you think?

In the long run, of course, demographics are on our side, and I'm pretty confident we'll get there eventually. But that 0.whatever% difference at the ballot box on Tuesday, it seems to me, can move the date when we do achieve equality forward or backward by at least a decade. So that's worth a day's work.

[dichroic]

Not quite what I meant. In Arizona this sort of amendment was already voted down (of course, in AZ that doesn't make any practical difference, since there are other laws against same-sex marriage) and they just brought it back and put it on the ballot *again*, four years later.

I didn't mean that CA is only one part of the country, but that I don't know how permanent this is. Is there a reason that if this prop doesn't pass* it couldn't be revived from the dead in a few years?

*fingers and toes crossed!

[elsmi]

Oh, I see. In principle, it could be. Maybe I'm wrong, and even if we win it will be. Man, that would suck.

But I'm pretty confident, because there's an inertia to these things. Partly it's demographics -- every year the voting public is more in favor of gay marriage, so if they're already under 50% this year, well... But more importantly, if they come back next time round with another attempt at this, that's another year of people getting married (also worth $millions to our economy -- marriage tourism!), the sky not falling, more and more people knowing a friend or a friend-of-a-friend who's in a same-sex marriage, and just a general consensus that yeah, we had this argument, we the public made up our mind, so why are you bugging us about this again? Having an actual up-or-down vote on the actual question settles the issue in a way that these weird kabuki "should this illegal thing also be unconsitutional?" votes do not.

Or so I think. Let's hope we get to find out :-). (Have anyone on your friend's list in CA? ;-))