The Cali Garmo

Jerame Davis from the Bilerico Project recently wrote a post presenting his ideas on why we should be fighting for basic rights such as being able to work, eat, and live before we fight for marriage. What?!

'Can we drop marriage as "the issue" for 2009?' writes Davis as he talks about how he believes that we should be fighting for basic equality before we fight for marriage. He sites Indiana where there is currently no law on the books for hate crimes against LGBT people in Indiana. The funny part is that he then goes on to state that the Indiana police themselves don't even report/follow hate crime laws and therefore the state 'doesn't have hate crimes' as they are never reported. That to me sounds more like you have corrupt police rather than a not working system. If everyone in Indiana finds hate crimes pointless as they will be 'disregarded anyway' then what is the point of pushing hate crime legislation? If the police aren't going to follow the law, then why have the laws? And the same applies to marriages. If every government official in the state refused to hand out marriage certificates to same-sex couples then there would be no point to having the law, it wouldn't be followed anyway. You have to fight the battles you know will have a point.

Davis then talks about how millions of dollars were spent in California to stop proposition 8 and that it passed anyway and so the money should have been used elsewhere. Just some points though: Prop 8 was headed toward defeat with polls putting its defeat at roughly 52% against it at least a month before the election. It wasn't until funding from the Mormon Church in Utah came in that everything turned around. It was one of the most liberal states vs. one of the most conservative states. Davis should not be illusioned by the thoughts that the money from this fight could have been used better elsewhere. There was in fact not enough money flowing into the campaign.

A lot of people look to California for hope and inspiration. We are the state with some of the strictest environmental laws (which would be stricter if the the EPA would just let us be). We also have the largest economy in the U.S. (and 8th in the world). California already has laws providing non-discrimination for LGBT people and so the next step for us was to fight for gay marriage, which we did. We even had gay marriage, and it wasn't our choice to have to fight for it to be kept. We fought Proposition 8, funded Proposition 8s defeat, because we didn't want to lose rights already given to us, that we deserved.

It was a way to let the rest of America know that we the people of California, and not the courts, approve of gay marriage. If California would have voted down Proposition 8 then anti-gay-rights people would have no argument against 'liberal' courts allowing same-sex marriage because according to the courts even the population is ok with it, and that is what the fight was about. That we, as a society, are ok with homosexuals. That we are ok with them being our co-worker, our neighbor, our teacher, our grocery clerk, and that they are normal. The defeat would have given other states the reason to pass non-discrimination acts in order to not get their constituents angry because now 'gay' is ok. That was the fight we were fighting, and that is the fight we have yet to win.

So no, we will not stop making marriage 'the issue' in California because that is our issue to deal with and we still need to prove that we as a state have morals and the ability to extend rights to all individuals, no matter what. And that is the state I hope we will evolve into (soon).

Davis' post can be read here.