By Stuart Gaffney and John Lewis–
It was a typical scorcher in San Bernardino, California, back on July 25, 2009, with temperatures approaching the century mark. Crowded inside a meeting hall were over 200 LGBTIQ activists there to debate when to go to the ballot to repeal Proposition 8, the horrific statewide initiative that several months before had taken away same-sex couples’ hard-won constitutional right to marry in California. The atmosphere in the room sometimes felt as heated as the air outside.
“Back to the ballot in 2012!” “2012? That’s far too long to wait—2010!” encapsulated some of the impassioned arguments activists made in searching and strategizing about what to do next. Sometimes, the meeting became so raucous that, to bring it back to order, we had to clang an old farm dinner bell that Stuart’s dad had lent us for the occasion.
The reason the debate was so impassioned was the utterly devastating effect that Prop. 8’s passage had had on the LGBTIQ community, exacerbated by much of the community’s frustration about the “No on 8” campaign itself. The position paper of one group urging a 2010 return to the ballot vividly described the feelings of many in the community who “feel the pain of last November as if it were yesterday, each morning. These people know they will feel that pain each morning until Prop 8 is erased.”
Ironically, it was the federal lawsuit against Prop. 8, Perry v. Schwarzenegger, filed in district court in San Francisco earlier that same month, and not a ballot initiative that would return marriage equality to California in 2013. The dream of overturning Prop. 8 at the ballot box, shared by all who attended the July 2009 San Bernardino meeting, took over 15 years to come true when California voters earlier this month passed Proposition 3 by a resounding 25 percentage points, approximately 62.5% to 37.5%, with the final votes still being tallied.
With Prop 3’s passage, marriage equality has now come full circle in California.
Prop. 3’s margin of victory reflects a near mirror reversal of 2000’s Proposition 22, California’s first harmful statewide ballot measure against marriage equality. Prop. 22 passed by over 22 points, 61.3 to 38.7. Eight years later, the margin of defeat was reduced to just 4.5 points when Prop. 8 passed 52.2 to 47.8, and some experts believe that Prop. 8 could have been defeated with a more effective campaign against it.
The political climate toward marriage equality has changed dramatically in California over the past nearly fifty years since Governor Jerry Brown signed the first explicit same-sex marriage ban into state law in 1977, two years after signing into law the repeal of the state’s law criminalizing same-sex sexual activity. Brown later evolved into a strong marriage equality supporter, instrumental in overturning Prop. 8 in the courts.
Over 25 years later, the California Legislature in 2005 became the first in the nation to pass marriage equality without being required to do so by a court, but it passed in both houses only by a single vote. We’ll never forget the expressions of pure joy that filled the California State Assembly gallery late in the evening of September 6, 2005, when speaker pro tempore Leland Yee banged the gavel seconds after the deciding vote was cast, making sure that no legislator had time to change their mind. However, no Republicans voted in favor, and the very next day Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that he would veto the bill.
In 2024, the California Legislature put Proposition 3 on the ballot without a single no vote, passing 67–0 in the Assembly and 31–0 in the Senate. This time around, no Republicans voted in opposition in either house, and nine Assembly Republicans actually voted in favor, while others in both houses didn’t vote. With Prop. 3’s passage, the freedom to marry in California is now safe even if the U.S. Supreme Court were to overturn its 2015 Obergefell nationwide marriage equality decision and the federal Respect for Marriage Act were held inadequate to protect marriage equality in individual states.
But as we all know, Prop. 3’s victory came in the same election in which Kamala Harris was defeated for president, and Republicans hurled unprecedented political attacks against transgender people in political ads. In this moment, it’s not enough to say that securing civil rights very often takes time, as it did with marriage equality in California and with many other issues.
The enormous influence of money in campaigns, vicious political advertising, gross public misinformation and manipulation, and disillusionment and disempowerment of countless Americans, already strong forces in 2008, reached new levels in 2024. As many activists articulated back in San Bernardino in 2009, every day that passes without full dignity and equality for LGBTIQ people is a day of harmful injustice.
We’ll never know whether we would have won a 2010 statewide marriage equality vote that many activists sought. But we do know that when all the votes are counted in 2024, over 9 million California voters will have voted for marriage equality, representing the highest number of people who have ever voted in favor of LGBTIQ rights on any state ballot measure in our nation’s history. Hawaii and Colorado also passed similar state constitutional protections for marriage equality this month by even wider margins of 69 to 31 and 64 to 36 percent respectively, with votes still being counted. And Sarah McBride will soon be the first transgender member of Congress.
As the LGBTIQ community will likely face formidable challenges in the immediate years ahead, we must take stock of our gains and harness the same passion evident in San Bernardino 15 years ago to continue to stand up for our lives and move forward together as a community.
John Lewis and Stuart Gaffney, together for over three decades, were plaintiffs in the California case for equal marriage rights decided by the California Supreme Court in 2008. Their leadership in the grassroots organization Marriage Equality USA contributed in 2015 to making same-sex marriage legal nationwide.
6/26 and Beyond
Published on November 21, 2024
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