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Election analysis: Pain and progress

Even the referendum results have a silver lining

Wayne Besen

In spite of what appears to be crushing defeats in four states, the GLBT movement is in remarkably good shape. While anti-gay organizations may be rejoicing, a look at the larger picture shows their victories are vacuous.

Let's consider that in 2000, Californians voted 61.4 percent to 38.6 percent in favor of prohibiting same-sex marriage. In this year's vote for Proposition 8, the right's margin for victory was narrowed to 52 percent to 48 percent. This slim edge was achieved only after the most powerful religious bodies on the planet did everything but launch a new Inquisition.

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Think about this: $40 million was spent scaring voters and our powerful opponents could only scare up 52 percent of the vote. If the GLBT community spent the identical sum of money on a ballot initiative to ban Mormon marriage, we might be able to pull off a victory.

If I were the Religious Right, I would be downright depressed.

Indeed, a Prozac-popping statistic that ought to terrify the right is that 67 percent of voters under 29 years old were opposed to Proposition 8. Meanwhile, the most anti-gay voters were over 65, with 59 percent voting in favor of the Amendment. Rightwing organizations can't take solace in knowing that those celebrating Prop. 8 were more likely to be popping Maalox than a Champagne cork. A few more years of shifting demographics and we will be well on our way to victory.

What is unfortunate about the defeats is that the GLBT community lost some of its leverage. Winning would have given an air of inevitability and offered the appearance of low political risk for supporting equality. Instead, we find ourselves at a historic moment -- yet we are not full participants in the big party.

Still, a Democratic House, Senate and president will likely mean tremendous advancements. If our community leaders are wise, they will set a reasonable timetable for passing pro-gay legislation. Perhaps, the most prudent time to vote on the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, or a hate-crime bill would be this coming summer. This would give Obama time to first address economic concerns and other broad issues and build some political capital.

If we are not strategic about timing, it may give Republicans an opportunity for obstruction, much as it did when Bill Clinton tried to allow gays to serve openly in the military in 1993.

Most important, Obama's election ensures that the judiciary, particularly the Supreme Court, will not be turned over to extremist ideologues. If McCain had won, we would have had to face the anti-gay rulings of judgmental judges for decades.

Finally, our defeats have energized our community -- as evidenced by protest rallies across the nation. People who have long been complacent now understand that we will have to buckle down and fight for our future. While the historic 2008 elections caused much pain, we can be heartened that there was also progress.

Author, activist and blogger Wayne Besen is the founder of Truth Wins Out, a non-profit group countering ex-gay ministries.

Election analysis: Pro-Obama, pro-choice, but anti-gay

Mixed messages come from referendum results

Liz Highleyman

As California goes, so goes the nation. If Prop 8 had failed, it might have signaled the end of the religious right's prominent role in politics, which began in the late 1970s with Anita Bryant's "Save Our Children" campaign and the California Brigg's Initiative, and solidified under the Reagan administration during the early years of AIDS.

A funny thing happened on the way to election night. While gay rights took hits in California, Florida, Arizona and Arkansas, moves to limit reproductive freedom were roundly shot down across the country, including a parental consent measure in California, a move to define a fertilized egg as a person in Colorado and a reprise of South Dakota's stringent abortion ban.

These results are puzzling, given that abortion is usually at the top of the evangelical and Catholic agendas. Perhaps in California, the furor over gay marriage diverted enough attention to give young women some breathing room, at least until the anti-abortion forces make yet another attempt to impose parental control via the ballot box.

But in a year when Democrats dominated the polls, traditional cultural conservatives alone could not have delivered such a crushing blow to the gay community. It appears they had some help from a newly risen segment of the electorate that is pro-Obama, pro-choice, but has a blind spot when it comes to gay rights.

Polls suggest that many of these voters were African-Americans and Latinos mobilized for the first time by the Obama campaign. This observation has the potential to drive a wedge into many a progressive coalition, but dismissing it as "racism" will not change the facts. The lopsided anti-gay vote by otherwise liberal blacks underlines where the gay community has failed to make alliances. Branding everyone who voted against same-sex marriage as a bigot or hate-monger would be a serious mistake.

Our legal beagles have already filed a lawsuit against Prop 8. And a growing segment of civil libertarians -- though not the leaders of the large national gay organizations -- are calling for the state to get out of the marriage business altogether. Let anyone, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, have a civil union, and leave the notion of sacred marriage to religion, where it belongs.

Whichever way today's battles go, expansion of our civil rights appears inevitable. Among people under 30, even many churchgoing Republicans do not oppose gay rights; among their elders, even many liberals (including, it seems, most Democratic politicians) can't get their heads around the idea of same-sex marriage. Though cold comfort to those who want the privileges of legal marriage right now, in five or 10 years, people will probably wonder why this seemed like such a big deal.

Liz Highleyman is a freelance journalist and medical writer based in San Francisco.

Election Analysis: Look to Congress, not Obama for progress

The new president will not spend his political capital on queer issues

Doug Ireland

Apart from a few rhetorical flourishes, some token appointments ˆ la Clinton, and the elimination of many of the baser forms of administrative discrimination institutionalized under George Bush, Barack Obama will not be inclined to spend his post-election political capital for any major initiatives on behalf of queers.

Obama's new chief of staff and lead agenda-setter, Rahm Emanuel, made that quite clear in a November 8 interview with the Wall Street Journal, in which he said, "Our challenge is to work to solve the actual problems that the country is facing, not work to satisfy any constituency or ideological wing of the party," and the Journal added that "he cited issues like 'gays in the military' as more damaging politically. 'It's not what we campaigned on,' said Mr Emanuel." Obama and the centrist team he is assembling will pride themselves on being "pragmatic," look at the across-the-board de-feats queers suffered in all the state referenda this year, and conclude that gay electoral clout doesn't command bringing the GLBT agenda to the fore in the middle of an economic crisis of gigantic proportions.

So, any major proactive gay initiatives will have to come from Congress, not the White House. But despite the expanded Democratic majorities in both Houses, the Democratic caucuses in both chambers in the new Congress will actually be somewhat more conservative than in the old. The newbies, particularly in the House, reflect the emphasis the Democratic leadership put on recruiting center-right candidates in swing districts and states, and a number of them are downright conservative Blue Dogs.

There are two notable exceptions. In Colorado, 33-year-old multimillionaire internet entrepreneur and philanthropist Jared Polis, an anti-war progressive, spent $5 million of his own money to make history as the first openly gay man ever elected as a freshman member of Congress (all the others came out well after they were elected). While Polis's election owes nothing to Nancy Pelosi and her leadership team, and he's too rich to be easily intimidated, Barney Frank remains the senior gay in the House Democratic command, and the Obama administration (especially with Barney's old colleague Emanuel as its enforcer) will follow his lead on GLBT issues.

The other newbie of note is Oregon's new Senator Jeff Merkley. He's a former community organizer of housing for the poor who, as Speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives, passed a wide range of GLBT civil rights measures, and has an organic working relationship with his state's GLBT organizations. But we'll be bereft of any senior senator willing to step up to the plate for us in a major way. Only a broad activist mobilization of the kind United ENDA provided last year as an alternative to the trimmers and temporizers of the accommodationist Human Rights Campaign can provide us with real hope of important legisl- ative breakthroughs that are inclusive. But if they can be passed, Obama will sign them.

Doug Ireland, a longtime radical political journalist, is US correspondent for the French weekly political-investigative magazine Bakchich. Before turning to journalism, he successfully managed the Congressional election campaigns of progressive Democrats Bella Abzug and Allard Lowenstein.

Election Analysis: Looking down ballot

Some good came from referendums

Paul Varnell

Most gays and lesbians are pleased as punch over the election of Senator Barack Obama as President. But the pleasure was alloyed by the fact that referendums banning same-sex marriage were approved in Florida, Arizona and California. The California loss was particularly painful because it reversed a state Supreme Court ruling allowing same-sex marriages.

But despite an enormous influx of anti-gay money contributed by Mormons, gays lost by only 52 to 48 percent. That is far better than the 61 percent by which same-sex marriage was banned just a few years ago. With growing acceptance of gay marriage, another referendum in 10 years might reverse the current policy.

Better news on marriage came from New York, where voters gave the Democrats a slim majority in the state senate. That increases the chances that a gay-marriage bill will pass now both houses of the state legislature. Governor David Paterson has said he would sign such a measure.

We can also take pleasure in other gains at the state level. Colorado voters elected Jared Polis, an openly gay man, to the US House of Representatives. He becomes the third openly gay member of the House.

Several states also took small steps toward increased personal liberty and autonomy. Washington voters authorized assisted suicide. The measure gives people more control over their lives and helps undercut the notion that the government can tell them that they have to keep on living even if they do not want to.

Massachusetts voters approved by a whopping 70 percent a proposal to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, and Michigan voters decided to allow use of marijuana for medical purposes. People are growing tired of the expensive and unsuccessful "War on Drugs."

Voters in South Dakota and Colorado wisely re-jected measures that would have banned abortion, in Colorado by a margin of nearly 3 to 1. The latter measure would have defined life as beginning at conception. In a morally insignificant sense it does. But meaningful personhood certainly does not.

Sadly, one promising measure in San Francisco was defeated -- a proposal to decriminalize commercial sex. You can work an unpleasant job in a factory or in the fields, but you cannot be paid for something you might even do for free. The law against prostitution is rooted in the medieval idea that sex is bad and nothing should be allowed to encourage it. Opponents of decriminalization claim they want to prevent sex trafficking in women. But that is a separate law-enforcement issue. And even if it weren't, it is no reason to ban prostitution by males.

Longtime Chicago columnist Paul Varnell is a frequent contributor to Independent Gay Forum ( Indegayfor_um.org ).