DID THE 2004 ELECTION demonstrate that Americans oppose gay rights? After traveling to Oregon and spending ten days volunteering with the effort to defeat that state’s anti-gay constitutional amendment, I came away concluding that this was not the case. They’re not against gay rights, and most of them aren’t even against gay marriage. They’re uncomfortable with it, though. They find it hard to talk about, even with their family members, and they often don’t know very much about what civil marriage actually entails. In this context, the opposition’s slogan, “One Man, One Woman,” played rather effectively upon voters’ unfamiliarity and discomfort with this issue.
The “No on Constitutional Amendment 36” campaign lost, as most people expected it would. And although the margin (57 to 43 percent) was closer in Oregon than in any of the other ten states where voters have just decided to alter their states’ constitutions so as to make people like me second-class citizens in perpetuity, it still hurts. And most of all,
My conclusion that this issue didn’t throw the election is based on my experiences in Oregon last fall volunteering for the campaign to defeat that state’s proposed amendment. As a doctoral student in Chicago, I was able to take ten days off from studying for my qualifying exams to participate in a National Gay and Lesbian Task Force program that brought activists from around the country to help out in Oregon, where the campaign against the amendment had a better chance than in most states. As a volunteer, I dialed at least 1,500 phone numbers and knocked on several hundred doors in the tri-county area of Portland and its suburbs. The commissioners of Multnomah County, in Portland proper, decided last spring that denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples violated constitutional guarantees of equal protection, and proceeded to give out some 3,000 licenses. While Multnomah is the most liberal county in an unequivocally blue state, it is nevertheless revealing that voters there, who had gotten a close-up view of actual same-sex marriages, rejected the amendment by a margin of three to two.
I spoke with the entire spectrum of people on both sides of the marriage issue, including many who know gay people and care about gay rights but still feel deeply ambivalent or conflicted about same-sex marriage. Many others were woefully ill-informed. A typical mix of confusion and ambivalence was evinced by a young mother who told me that she believed homosexuality was immoral, but also that she thought it was wrong that her gay cousin, who’s had the same partner since she was three years old (!), couldn’t get health insurance through her partner’s job. One of my fellow volunteers literally had to explain to another Oregon voter that a No vote would not jeopardize the legal recognition of her own heterosexual marriage.
Misconceptions such as these were systematically sown by the pro-amendment side, which resorted to lies to frighten a bewildered public. The “Yes on 36” campaign’s website, for example, stated that the ultimate purpose of “most gay leaders” in trying to win marriage equality was to “destroy [and/or] abolish the family.” In the last week of the election, they sent out a mass mailing of fliers showing a blonde little girl on the cover with the headline, “The classroom will never be the same.” Inside, voters were told that if the amendment were not passed, “the details of gay sex” would be taught in Oregon’s public schools. The superintendent of schools issued a statement condemning the flier, but of course it was no use.
Civil unions and similar provisions now have majority support nationwide. In California, home to one in nine Americans, partnership protections in realms such as child custody, legal disputes, housing protections, bereavement leaves, and other state benefits became the law of the land on January 1, 2005, and that state’s Republican governor has recently signed a bill requiring insurance companies to provide coverage to registered domestic partners. Even George Bush embraced civil unions in the final days of the campaign in a desperate attempt to soften his extremist image. The problem we face is not that most Americans are fundamentalist bigots but that the religious Right is bringing on board too many basically decent people who voted to ban gay marriage without understanding what they were voting for.
IT’S HARD TO PREDICT how any individual will feel about gay marriage, but it’s important to find out. This was the most important thing I learned from the excellent training I and the other volunteers received from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force organizing staff. The key here was grasping the range of concerns that undecided voters typically voice when asked about the amendment: their children, their faith, the wisdom of overturning what they believed was thousands of years of tradition. Language was important: we learned to say “unequal treatment” instead of “discrimination,” because undecided voters had not responded well to the latter word when applied to the current status of gay people under state marriage laws. We also learned to say “gay marriage” rather than “same-sex marriage” because it was more familiar to voters.
I talked to voters in and around Portland ranging from lily-white Beaverton, where Nike has its headquarters, to poor black neighborhoods in northeast Portland. The campaign concentrated on densely populated areas on the theory that potential supporters were here and that it was important to turn out that base. Everywhere I went I encountered a minority of people who were firmly opposed to gay marriage. Many, but not all, of them offered religious reasons for their views.
I heard every imaginable response from voters. A few people said things that I found startling and difficult to hear. One man told me at his front door that homosexuals who try to get married should go to jail. Another man, when I identified myself on the phone as a volunteer for No on Constitutional Amendment 36 (we always called it this rather than “Measure 36” to stress the finality of the act), said, “Why don’t you go suck some cock?” On election eve, standing and waving signs at one end of one of Portland’s busiest bridges, we got about one hostile gesture for every twenty honks, smiles, or thumbs-up signs; one guy rolled down his window and said, “You’re gay—fuck you!”
Those were the worst moments, but they were offset by the many informative and even touching conversations I had, which revealed a range of sometimes unexpected anxieties. For example, a number of respondents expressed a concern that their children might turn out to be gay. Others wondered whether legalizing gay marriage could force churches to perform such ceremonies. Many others, when asked to elaborate on their thinking, voiced ideas about the potential consequences of the amendment that were incoherent and downright incorrect.
We were trained to be careful in our canvasses to give people room to admit to their discomfort with gay marriage. I can’t tell you how much mileage we got from this insight. Just saying in a sympathetic tone, “A lot of people are uncomfortable with gay marriage,” worked wonders in getting people to articulate the precise nature of their discomfort, confusion, or ignorance. Many people thought gay couples should have all the rights that straight couples do, but also believed that marriage should only be between a man and a woman—and it was best to draw out both of these feelings as a way of building common ground with heterosexual voters. It’s also useful to point out that many gay people are just as surprised as straight people by the issue’s sudden emergence, and that many gays who oppose amending the state constitution have no personal interest in getting married. One 18-year-old male, a registered independent, came to the door of his suburban house and said earnestly that he hoped I wouldn’t be offended, but he was planning to vote Yes. He thought gay couples should have the same rights as straight couples but that it shouldn’t be called “marriage.” He said he supported civil unions and listened intently when I explained that Oregon does not allow civil unions and isn’t expected to legislate them in the foreseeable future, while a constitutional amendment would create a legal precedent that could be used to uphold unequal treatment in future legal disputes.
One woman that I reached by phone said she was glad I’d called because she hadn’t had an opportunity to hear a gay person’s perspective on the amendment—an assumption belied by the fact that we had many deeply committed straight volunteers on our side. Many people who said they were voting for the amendment also expressed doubts, because they had a gay cousin, they liked their daughter’s gay friend, or the like. I suspect straight people in general know much more about gay people today than they did ten or twenty years ago. Those under thirty, say, are vastly more likely than the rest of the electorate to support gay marriage and to have good friends who are openly gay. And people increasingly know and accept the partners of their gay relatives, even if they don’t always approve of “it.”
The single most frustrating conversation I had was on election day, over the phone, with a voter in rural eastern Oregon who had completed her ballot the previous evening along with her husband. They had both voted yes, but after our discussion of the legal precedent that a constitutional amendment would set, she told me she wished I had called the night before, because if she were voting now, she would probably vote no.
When the question of children came up, I tried to steer the conversation away from abstractions and instead bring up crisis situations that a family might face and how anti-gay amendments would affect them. I suspect that hospital visitation has become our single most effective selling point because of the way that health care looms as a daily worry for most Americans. People can imagine hospitals as places where one might encounter an unreasonable, cruel, and hostile public policy or bureaucracy. Only once, in a conversation in which I wasn’t getting anywhere, did I bring up with a voter the historical analogy of interracial marriage—and immediately regretted it. The guy simply declared that banning interracial marriage was wrong because racial discrimination is wrong—the implication being that anti-gay discrimination was acceptable. Since in his own mind this voter had taken the moral high ground, it was difficult to know how to continue the conversation.
I spoke with many people who were unaware that civil unions do not currently exist in Oregon—or, if they knew, didn’t allow that to influence their decision on the ballot question. They almost certainly don’t know that gay activists have sought civil unions in the legislature for decades. But even the very ill-informed, when pressed, often supported civil unions for long-term couples. Many said things like “I think they should be able to visit them if they’re in the hospital, but I just don’t know about gay marriage.” One first-time voter, a teenager who was ambivalent about gay marriage, volunteered that perhaps the amendment was silly because it wouldn’t, after all, stop people from being gay. True enough, I thought, and thanked him for his vote. In a poor black neighborhood in northeast Portland, a man listened to me, smiled, and said, “We’re in synch. To each his own, right?”
One time I managed to start a shouting match between neighbors. A woman picking up her mail at an apartment complex volunteered that she was for gay marriage but against gay adoption—she thought the child of a gay couple would face terrible bullying at school—and planned to vote “no.” Her neighbor overheard us and exclaimed mockingly, “My friend wants to marry his dog!” I informed him that this was not what was on the ballot. At this point the woman, who had expressed only lukewarm interest up to now, became totally animated and yelled at the guy: “That is just total crap! This has nothing to do with that! I’m voting no!” Turning to me, she added: “You have my vote!”
One straight married woman told me by phone about a close friend who had died in the early years of the AIDS epidemic. In the weeks before his death, he had told her that within her lifetime gay people would win the right to marry, and while she had thought he was wrong at the time, she had come to believe he was right.
CONTRARY TO the “Yes” side’s spurious claims, the gay marriage debate is not a referendum on the Bible, the family, or the morality of homosexuality. Those questions simply are not what’s on the ballot when a marriage amendment is proposed, and this is the point we need to hammer home. What’s on the ballot is whether the right to marry is to be limited to straight people. In Oregon, if a person had a core belief that homosexuality is immoral, or that marriage exists for procreation, I found that it was crucial to avoid prolonged discussion of this belief and to try to steer the conversation to more concrete topics, especially the actual experiences of gay people. But it was also important to undermine the opposition’s most outlandish claims, such as the notion that school curricula were at stake.
In the aftermath of the election, some Democrats despaired that same-sex marriage initiatives may have cost the party a significant proportion of their most loyal constituency, African-American voters. But in the eleven states with marriage amendments on the ballot, the racial differences in CNN’s exit polling generally were small. Moreover, in ten of the eleven states, white voters were more likely than black voters to favor the ban. There is little evidence supporting the Right’s efforts to exploit this minority by assuming that people of color are more homophobic than whites. Moreover, Kerry won Oregon by a landslide, which means that a substantial group of Democrats voted for the constitutional amendment and yet wanted to elect a president who supports civil unions.
Knowing a gay person, especially a gay family member, makes a huge difference in shaping people’s attitudes. Young people are far more comfortable talking about homosexuality than their parents and especially their grandparents. A huge proportion of the people who volunteered to canvass, particularly close to election day, were college students, and there were even some high school students. Shouting matches approaching civil unrest were reported when volunteers for Yes on 36 set up a table at Portland State University.
In the battle to define the terms of the marriage debate, I think key Democratic allies ceded too much ground before the conversation even began. A chorus of Democrats, including even Barney Frank, complained that we were moving too fast and the country wasn’t ready. Granted, we may need to reframe the case for same-sex marriage in terms that make it easier for many straight people to understand. But one thing the GLBT leadership has not emphasized is that—at least in Oregon, and I suspect elsewhere in the country—our supposed allies left us high and dry. The Oregon AFL-CIO didn’t take a position on the constitutional amendment, probably for fear of alienating Kerry voters. Nike, based in suburban Beaverton and a key financial backer of efforts to defeat previous anti-gay ballot measures in the state, refused to contribute any money this time around, fearing that supporting gay marriage could only hurt them. Consequently, gay organizations had to spend a great deal of energy on more protracted struggles to raise smaller chunks of money elsewhere.
Finally, evangelical Christians, however energetic they are about showing up at the polls, simply aren’t anywhere near a majority of voters. They aren’t in Ohio, in Florida, or in the U.S. as a whole. Most voters do support the concept of benefits and protections for gay couples but feel uncomfortable with “gay marriage” and don’t have a clear notion of how these two views might be contradictory. Rather than trying to address these complex realities, the Democratic leadership is now publicly weighing whether to sell out their gay constituency and others who support gay rights.
I think the vast majority of Americans simply don’t understand what’s at stake in the same-sex marriage debate. Most Americans have gay friends and relatives that they know and like; most support benefits and protections for gay couples; and many straight Americans are aware of some of the inequities that their gay friends and relatives face. And most are uncomfortable with gay marriage—not dead-set against it, not obsessed with it, not likely to have spent all that much time thinking about it, but uncomfortable. They think it’s weird. When these amendments come along, they’re not equipped to separate these ill-defined feelings from the very real legal effects of their vote. And this makes them vulnerable to manipulation of the facts and demagogic scare tactics. The task for us is one of educating voters as to what civil marriage is, what effects these amendments will have, and why gay people even want to get married. If there’s anything my conversations with voters has convinced me of, it’s that the more people know about the issue, the better able they are to answer these questions for themselves, and the more likely they are to grasp the discriminatory effect of these amendments as well as the argument for equality in marriage.
Timothy Stewart-Winter is a doctoral student in history at the University of Chicago. His research interests include gender and sexuality.
