Losing California

Dale Carpenter again.

...the narrow margin of yesterday's loss masks some hard facts for the gay-marriage movement. Counting the losses for gay marriage in Arizona and Florida yesterday, we are now 0-30 in ballot fights. In California, we lost under circumstances that were as favorable to our side as they are likely to be for some time. We lost in deep blue territory on a blue night, when Obama carried the state by an astonishing 61% (running ahead of the opposition to Prop 8 by more than 13%). We lost despite being on the "no" side in a ballot fight, with the built-in advantage that gives you among those who vote "no" on everything out of understandable proposition fatigue. We lost despite the state attorney general changing the ballot title to reflect that it "eliminates rights," something most Americans don't like to do no matter the subject.

There was some commentary to the effect that Prop 22, saying the same thing as Prop 8, passed by over 61% some eight years ago, and Prop 8 only passed with 54% of the vote.  The assertion is, if you draw a straight line trend, it's just over one percentage point per year.  Presumably, if it comes up again in 2012, same-sex marriage will pass.  As Dale points out, expecting a straight-line trend is naive.

On the other hand, there are the reasons people have for voting in favor of Prop 8:

Something else, however, concerns me even more than whether particular tacticians can manipulate a vote by a sufficient few percentage points to eek out a narrow win in the next few years in California and other states. That something else is much deeper.

Over the past few days I've volunteered at various sites in the Bay Area trying to get people to come out and vote against Prop 8. This included speaking at a rally, distributing literature, and holding up signs to passing motorists. While I got an overwhelmingly favorable reception, not surprising for the Bay Area, I saw firsthand an angry and ugly underbelly of the opposition to gay marriage. I was called a "sicko," had the Bible cited to me more than once, was asked whether I'd want my "own child to be one," and was told that "they" molest lots of children, among other things.

The reality is that to a very large part of the country, and even in the bluest parts of the bluest states, homosexuality is not seen as normal and gay relationships are not seen as healthy and contributing to a society's well-being. Whether that's because of religion or because of the "ick" factor or some combination of the two, it doesn't much matter. It's there and it's only grudgingly and slowly giving up ground. This is especially true among blacks, some 70% of whom voted for Prop 8 yesterday even as they overwhelmingly supported Barack "God is in the mix" Obama. (Whites and Latinos narrowly opposed Prop 8.) It's also true of several major religious groups.

The smartest leaders of the gay-marriage movement know all of this. That's why gays were invisible in the No on 8 campaign. The literature I handed out talked in generalities about "discrimination" and about how it was "wrong" and "unfair" to take away marriage from some unnamed group of people. I scoured the literature and found no reference to "gays." The No on 8 ads featured almost no gay couples, and especially no gay-male couples, who are especially repugnant to many people according to polls. In one ad, Senator Feinstein was even agnostic about gay marriage itself ("However you feel about marriage . . . ").

The problem is, it's easy to make a liberal case for same-sex marriage. Two dimensions of morality that liberals respond to have to do with harm and fairness.  Thus, the arguments they raise against any restrictions on same-sex marriage focus on those two dimensions.  It won't hurt anyone else if "Adam and Steve" are allowed to marry each other, and it's unfair if they're not allowed to marry.  Conservatives, however, respond to additional sets of values, and in particular:

...social conservatives also value ... purity/sanctity (a relatively new part of the moral mind, related to the evolution of disgust, that makes us see carnality as degrading and renunciation as noble).

But while the other moral dimensions have a longer history, the purity/sanctity dimension is new enough that many cultures don't have a well-established vocabulary to express it.  Reactions to violations of this aspect of morality are inchoate -- expressed as a sense of "wrongness", or the "ick factor", or shifted to another dimension, such as authority/respect (the Bible forbids it, or tradition forbids it).

To those who are color-blind to the moral dimensions in question, it's going to be very hard to frame an effective campaign against same-sex marriage.