We’ve been pretty quiet about Prop 8 recently, but that’s more because of the other stuff going on taking precedence rather than anything else than anything else.  You know, there’s a thing or two going on in California politics these days.

Anyway, there’s been a measure kicking around in the Secretary of State’s Database for a few weeks. It is quite simple, and merely repeals the one line of text added into the State Constitution by Prop 8. The entire thing (PDF) is about 50 words, mostly procedural.  However, this basically came out of nowhere.  The group behind it, Yes on Equality is one of a number of very new groups to organize around marriage equality post-Prop 8.  While I’m all about doing over talking, this one probably could have been a little better managed by working with a broader coalition.  But, it seems they wanted to get a jump on the issue:

“Our logic is that we should not put all our eggs in one basket and wait for the Supreme Court,” said Charles Lowe, who after campaigning against Proposition 8 founded a Davis-based group called Yes! on Equality. “By doing so, we lose anywhere from 8 to 12 months.”(SacBee 1/21/09)

On a more collaborative organizing front, the Equality Summit is scheduled for this Saturday. It is intended to bring as many stakeholders as possible to the table to discuss options for moving the ball forward after our defeat on Prop 8.  Much of the meeting will be off the record, and for a summary of the brouhaha related to that, check out the Mad Professah diary. While I’m generally key on openness, perhaps it might be worthwhile to get some of the tension out in the open without the concern of it appearing in the interwebz.

Finally, there is one more interesting story to note.  A new group calling itself Yes on Gay Marriage! is trying to situate itself as a national pro-gay marriage lobbying group. Their major action thus far has been some initial organizing towards building a march upon Washington in favor of marriage equality.  Well, they have now hit a rough patch.  It turns out that the two main consultants, Kelley Moran and Barry Wyatt, have accepted money from Yes on Prop 8 for their COPS voter slate.  From the Bay Area Reporter:

Kelley Moran and Barry Wyatt are with Yes on Gay Marriage, an organization that, like others, seemed to come out of nowhere in recent weeks after the passage of Proposition 8, which eliminated same-sex marriage in California. Moran, who said that he married his same-sex partner of 16 years last summer, said last month that what sets his group apart is that it is leading the charge for a march on Washington.

The slate mailer carries the names of both the COPS Voter Guide and the California Vote by Mail voter guide, as well as the Yes on 8 logo. Records filed with the secretary of state show that Yes on 8 paid the COPS voter guide at least $25,000, as well as a total of at least $50,000 to the California Vote by Mail Voter Guide. … Last year, according to data filed with the secretary of state’s office, the COPS voter guide paid at least $245,000 to Moran and Associates, which Moran is president of, and at least $105,000 to Barry Wyatt Associates.

Moran essentially runs both of these guides, and is apparently willing to part with his values to chase the slate dollars.  Moran actually got married to his partner of 16 years while he was out pushing Yes on 8 on his slate mailers.  

As of yet, neither Moran nor Wyatt has openly discussed this issue.  It’s hard to imagine a real grassroots group growing up from such foundations. It’s something of grassroots buzzkill to know that the consultant is taking money from both sides. Whether the organization can grow beyond this controversy is also outstanding.

It took about four weeks for the San Diego County Registrar of Voters to finish counting every single vote of the 2008 General Election and then upload the vote database to their web site. After anxiously waiting for a few weeks, I took the database and converted it into a usable format and started producing some reports that allowed me to drill down and see exactly how each community and city voted.

I’ved used the term “community” to describe a place within the City of San Diego boundary, such as Mira Mesa and La Jolla and the term “unincorporated” means that the place is not a city, such as Julian and Alpine.

The data is first grouped into 18 cities and unincorporated area (19 total groups). The City of San Diego and unincorporated area are then broken down by community. After scanning each of the totals, it makes it very easy to compare the different political viewpoints of each of the communities. For example, Proposition 8 received an unsurprising 83% opposition in Hillcrest, while the Campo area voted 77% in favor of the proposition.

view all of the reports

In a remarkable column in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal right-wingers John Lott and Bradley Smith use the backlash against Prop 8 donors to suggest an end to campaign finance disclosure laws. They cite some of the more well-known examples of voter accountability for Prop 8 backers – Marjorie Christofferson, the Cinemark movie theater chain – to argue that campaign donations should be treated like a secret ballot:

How would you like elections without secret ballots? To most people, this would be absurd.

We have secret balloting for obvious reasons. Politics frequently generates hot tempers. People can put up yard signs or wear political buttons if they want. But not everyone feels comfortable making his or her positions public — many worry that their choice might offend or anger someone else. They fear losing their jobs or facing boycotts of their businesses.

And yet the mandatory public disclosure of financial donations to political campaigns in almost every state and at the federal level renders people’s fears and vulnerability all too real. Proposition 8 — California’s recently passed constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriage by ensuring that marriage in that state remains between a man and a woman — is a dramatic case in point. Its passage has generated retaliation against those who supported it, once their financial support was made public and put online.

This column could only be written in light of persistent media efforts to paint Yes on 8 donors as victims. By erasing the true victims – 18,000 same sex couples and the innumerable other couples who wished to follow them to full equality – folks like Steve Lopez have constructed a situation where the far right can use those supposed victims as a battering ram against campaign finance disclosure rules they’ve long opposed.

Lott’s and Smith’s argument is pernicious. They argue that mandatory disclosure limits freedom of speech and of political action, that anonymous donations have protected groups like the NAACP (from government harassment, not public accountability, as the columnists neatly ignore), and that public pressure to disclose donors will accomplish what regulations currently provide (yeah right).

This is not just a wingnut attempt to protect their wealthy allies. It’s an effort to lay the groundwork to undermine California’s disclosure laws in the event we return to the ballot to repeal Prop 8 in the near future. Without disclosure rules, it is highly likely that we will see much larger sums of money donated to the anti-gay cause.

Even before the post-election backlash unfolded, many wealthy donors and companies refrained from donating to the Yes on 8 campaign for fear of alienating customers and Californians. If these rules are relaxed then companies that rely on same sex marriage supporters for their profits could take that money, give it to the haters, without the public knowing or being able to take their business elsewhere. It could provide their side with a significant financial advantage over ours in a future ballot campaign.

That is likely the reason behind this op-ed. Sure, they buried it on the day after Christmas, but you can be assured it’s not the last we’ll hear of this argument. We would do well to prep our own response – that the public’s right to know is sacrosanct, that if the right wants money to be equated with speech that implies disclosure, and that this is nothing but an end run around our laws to allow corporations to dominate our elections.

The Yes on 8 campaign wants to invalidate 18,000 same sex marriages – they’ve filed a brief with the California Supreme Court to that effect today.

With Ken Starr – yes, that Ken Starr – as their lead counsel:

The sponsors of Proposition 8 asked the California Supreme Court on Friday to nullify the marriages of the estimated 18,000 same-sex couples who exchanged vows before voters approved the ballot initiative that outlawed gay unions.

The Yes on 8 campaign filed a brief arguing that because the new law holds that only marriages between a man and a woman are recognized or valid in California, the state can no longer recognize the existing same-sex unions.

“Proposition 8’s brevity is matched by its clarity. There are no conditional clauses, exceptions, exemptions or exclusions,” reads the brief co-written by Pepperdine University law school dean Kenneth Starr, the former independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton….

The measure’s backers announced Friday that Starr, a former federal judge and U.S. solicitor general, had signed on as their lead counsel and would argue the cases.

Aside from the horrific nature of this, and the irony in Ken Starr’s involvement, it’s also a pretty important opportunity to communicate to California just what Prop 8 does. It divorces 18,000 couples. Many Yes on 8 supporters lied to themselves and their families, saying that they weren’t hurting anyone, just trying to protect families from teh gays. Well now the mask comes off, and this really is about making a whole lot of people suffer.

UPDATE by Brian: As Be_Devine pointed out in November, Jerry Brown is not bound to defend Prop 8.  Back then, Brown was saying that he was going to defend it in the courts. Today, the AG announced that he submitted a brief opposing Prop 8, saying that it should be struck down on the amendment/revision grounds. (h/t to AmericanRiverCanyon in the comments)

UPDATE 2 by jsw:  We are also hearing reports that the Yes on 8 campaign is saying that the court made them attack current marriages in this brief.  That’s not true.  The sum total of the language demanding briefing on this issue in the Supreme Court’s show cause order of November 19 is this:

If Proposition 8 is not unconstitutional, what is its effect, if any, on the marriages of same-sex couples performed before the adoption of Proposition 8?

Nothing in that question required the Yes on 8 campaign to argue that the state should forcibly void the marriages of people who are currently married.  Ken Starr, now the primary legal representative of the anti-justice forces behind Yes on 8, is merely making public the true agenda of the leaders of the Yes on 8 campaign:  gay people should not have equal rights before the law, and the rights they do have should be taken away.  It’s just that simple, and everything else they said during the campaign was basically a lie.

Conservatives have for decades cultivated a politics of victimhood – presenting themselves as victims of some group, usually liberal and often an oppressed minority, in order to gain sympathy for their insane beliefs and to delegitimize progressive ideas and actions. We’re witnessing it on Proposition 8 as well, and now the media is playing along. The result is a massive distortion of the true effects of Prop 8, and the normalization of support for discriminatory policy.

The specific case is that of Margie Christofferson, who quit her job as a manager at LA’s El Coyote Restaurant under pressure from activists and customers angry at her donation of $100 to the Yes on 8 campaign. Her journey from oppressor to victim has been aided by Steve Lopez of the LA Times, who wrote a deeply flawed column on Sunday casting Christofferson as a sympathetic figure:

Margie Christoffersen didn’t make it very far into our conversation before she cracked. Chest heaving, tears streaming, she reached for her husband Wayne’s hand and then mine, squeezing as if she’d never let go.

“I’ve almost had a nervous breakdown. It’s been the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” she sobbed as curious patrons at a Farmers Market coffee shop looked on, wondering what calamity had visited this poor woman who’s an honest 6 feet tall, with hair as blond as the sun.

That sets the tone for a column that blames the victims of Prop 8 for making this poor woman cry, and Lopez isn’t above repeating disputed claims that riot police showed up at El Coyote during a recent rally. But perhaps the most troubling part of the column was Lopez’ normalization of her support for discrimination:

But I didn’t like what I was hearing about the vilification of Margie Christoffersen and others in California being targeted for the crime of voting their conscience.

“Voting our conscience” has been one of the key methods by which Prop 8 supporters have escaped responsibility for their actions or even acknowledging what Prop 8 was – an attack on the legal equality of thousands of Californians merely for their sexual orientation. When framed this way the Yes on 8 position becomes almost unassailable, immune to criticism. “They’re just voting their conscience,” we’re supposed to think, and not be allowed to ask them to face the realities of what they have done, not be allowed to criticize them for voting to take away equal rights and destroy existing marriages, and not be allowed to act with our own conscience by denying those who backed Prop 8 our patronage. Each of those acts is cast as an aggressive and hurtful act, where the oppressed are cast as oppressors.

Lopez mentions almost in passing that “thousands [of gay people] feel as though their civil rights have been violated” but their concerns and views don’t get the sob story treatment Margie Christofferson got – even though she knew full well what she was giving money for, and continues to believe that her vote for Prop 8 was the right move. As Lisa Derrick notes she has never apologized to her once-loyal customers for what she did. Obviously she feels no need to offer any such apology.

Lopez’ column writes the real victims of Prop 8 out of the story and replaces them with their victimizers. Once again GLBT Californians and their fundamental rights are treated as either deviant or invisible. The only people whose opinions matter are those who oppose gay rights, and if someone dares call it out then they become  the oppressors. Standing up for gay rights, for marriage equality, becomes itself an act of hate.

Margie Christofferson is not a sympathetic figure. She is someone in deep denial of reality, who is unwilling to reconcile her relationships with her own intolerance. It’s not the rest of Los Angeles’s job to play along with it, to enable it, to pretend as if it doesn’t exist. Doing so merely continues the decades of injustice that comes when good people do nothing and discrimination is treated as normal.

It would be nice if the traditional media would recognize this. It’s not likely that they will. Martin Luther King, Jr. may be venerated today but he was a controversial figure in his day who received FAR more criticism from the media than credit, who was told that the March on Washington was a dangerous provocation that should not be attempted. The Civil Rights Movement rightly refused to let such concern trolling stop them. We who are part of the marriage equality movement would do well to learn that lesson.