I was very disheartened on November 5th, 2008 when the State of California passed Proposition 8 and gay marriage was repealed in California. I found it to be especially cruel because over the summer, so many gay marriages were performed when they were legal, and now, those marriages could be annulled. It is one thing to ban gay marriage, but it is very cruel to then be told months later that your marriages no longer counts, according to your own state. And from that terrible moment forward, there has been a fierce debate inside the gay community on the way forward in the fight for gay marriage.
On one side is the state by state solution. Get as many states as possible to pass gay marriage and, like a domino effect, other states would pass gay marriage, until eventually the almost every state would allow it. On the other side was a new, younger, and rapidly growing generation of new gay activists who argued for a national strategy to take cases to the Supreme Court and get them to overturn the federal ban on gay marriage. After all, the Supreme Court struck down the ban on interracial marriage on June 12, 1967.
After personally contributed money to fight Prop. 8 (even though I was living in Florida at the time), I decided that I would no longer put my financial backing behind a losing strategy. But which strategy was the losing strategy? I don't back losers with my money.
In Washington D.C., there are 2 national groups that raise money to lobby Congress for gay rights. There is the Human Rights Campaign, and the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force. Both organizations mean well, but neither would commit to either a national or state by state strategy. Also, every state has an Equality coalition that lobbies on the state level while getting financial support from both the HRC and the Task Force. It was with a heavy heart that I decided that I could not send any organization 1 more penny until a winning strategy was decided upon and implemented.
Well, after this week's crushing defeat of gay marriage in Maine, it is clear that all the liberal states that have passed gay marriage have passed it. As a community, we've reached the end of the line with the state by state method and now it's time to admit that we lost, get up, brush ourselves off, and put all of our time, money, and political resources towards the federal Supreme Court fight.
If you believe in equal rights, then I encourage our political lobbiest to fully get behind the federal Supreme Court case and to put all of our political and financial resources toward overturning the federal ban on gay marriage. Find out more at: http://www.equalrightsfoundation.org/index.html
And until the HRC and Task Force fully back this initiative, I will continue to not support either group financially until they fully endorse the new national strategy.
UPDATE: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/nyregion/03marriage.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=gay%20marriage&st=cse
New York State rejects Gay Marriage Bill
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