Nationwide Protest Planned for Saturday

Wow, this looks like people might actually fight back for once. Proposition 8 was the California ballot item that prohibited marriages between same-sex couples there. Anti-gay bills also passed in Florida, Arizona, and Arkansas, heavily backed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other religious groups, and a lot of people are very unhappy about having their rights taken away.

A good amount of the anger is being directed at the Mormon church. For some reason that church decided this was going to be their issue, they preached it and squeezed donations out of people and campaigned to prevent equal rights for gay people, and now, as Andrew Sullivan mentioned the other day, "Gay people have every right to regard the Mormon church hierarchy as a mortal enemy."

The protest's motto is "Stop the H8 in your state." Check out their web site HERE. It's not the best web site I've ever seen, but it's a start.

It looks like there will be a protest in Baltimore, and in Montgomery County it will be held at the Mormon church in Kensington -- 9900 Stoneybrook Drive -- at 1:30 PM, Saturday, November 15th.

The issue is this: people's civil rights should not be put up for a vote. If two people love one another and want to get married and start a family, their decision should not require the approval of the majority of the population.

An article by Richard Kim in The Nation this week dissects the reasons for these losses, in particular the one in California, which has come to represent the whole batch. He argues that the campaign failed to understand the "Yes on 8 coalition's staggering disinformation campaign." It turns out that the religious right will say anything without regard to its truthfulness, and the pro-marriage advocates failed to appreciate this. I'll tell you, we've sure seen it in our county, the constant stream of lies has kept TeachTheFacts busy for four years now. Kim also notes that the anti-gay campaign was the first time the Christian right was able to reach minorities successfully:

From the beginning they bought up ad space in Chinese, black, Spanish and Korean media; they hosted massive rallies for ethnic Christians. The Sunday before election day, I went to Los Angeles City Hall for the most celebratory, most diverse rally I have ever attended; it was organized by Yes on 8 Chinese advocates.

Kim's third point was that the campaign for marriage equality was simply outmaneuvered.

Gay activists, by most accounts, were simply outmaneuvered. Andrea Shorter, a black lesbian volunteer for the No on 8 campaign, told me that the outreach to the African-American community began in earnest a week ago. "What's happened is that there's been an outcry from communities of color, including African-American communities, who say, 'Include us!' Now there's a GOTV strategy, but for some it seems last minute," she said in an interview before the election. Another No on 8 activist, Karin Wang, told me at the City Hall rally that when Asian Pacific Islander groups went to buy ads in Chinese and Korean newspapers, they were informed that Yes on 8 had been renting space for weeks.

Many gay leaders, especially those less central to the No on 8 efforts, told me that such disorder was endemic to gay efforts. "The campaign doesn't seem to have got its act together until a few weeks ago. It wasn't clicking. It wasn't raising money. It didn't have good ads on the air," says Rafael Mandelman of the San Francisco Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club.

I think what it comes down to is that the campaign organizers did not realize how hard this fight actually is. The anti-gay forces never sleep, they will say and do anything to win the battle, and there is a lot of money behind them. You can't expect a fair fight, you have to know they will fly under the radar when they can, they will take advantage of any opening, they will lie -- I think the good guys in California and these other places simply failed to understand how dirty the fight would be.

Honestly, you shouldn't have to fight in modern-day America for the right to marry the one you love, the right to have a family. But the fact is, you do, you can't take these simple things for granted, because some people think they know how you should live your life better than you do.