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Who’s to Blame for Maine?by Kilian MelloyFriday Nov 6, 2009 In the aftermath of Maine voters having narrowly rescinded marriage equality rights for gay and lesbian families, GLBT equality advocates are looking to assign blame.
In a Nov. 5 Politico posting, Matt Gagnon, a onetime candidate for Maine’s House of Representatives, detailed several factors that contributed to the defeat dealt to Maine families. Gagnon pointed to a lack of engagement from the Democratic Party and the Obama Administration. The Democratic National Committee’s Organizing for America did not join the fight for equality, but did solicit Maine Democrats for organizational assistance in New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine’s ultimately unsuccessful fight to hold on to office.
Wrote Gagnon, "This reinforces an existing opinion among many activists--namely, that the White House has been paying little more than lip service to the gay rights agenda and is not serious about standing up for equality."
Moreover, Gagnon contended, a "Bradley effect" was at work: despite pre-election polls showing that the anti-gay measure would fail, voters in opposition to marriage equality showed up to the polls in force, whereas not all voters who would have supported marriage got into voting booths.
Politico contributor Ben Smith posted a reply to Gagnon’s critique that same day. In an email, a spokesperson for the DNC, Hari Sevugan, wrote that, "In Maine there were over a half dozen ballot initiatives and referendums, and local municipal elections at stake and OFA sent an e-mail to thousands of activists encouraging them to vote in support of progressive causes and candidates. There were some Mainers who received an erroneous e-mail regarding the New Jersey Governor’s election--that e-mail was not intended to downplay the significance of Maine’s local elections."
But the sense that the White House has been unwilling to take substantive action on behalf of the GLBT community had been building for months, and the defeat in Maine only sharpened a sense of abandonment for some GLBT leaders. As reported by the Associated Press on Nov. 5, Freedom to Marry’s Evan Wolfson cited the president in the setback, saying, "President Obama missed an opportunity to state his position against these discriminatory attacks [in Maine] with the clarity and moral imperative that would have helped in this close fight... The anti-gay forces are throwing millions of dollars into various unsubtle ads aimed at scaring people, so subtle statements from the White House are not enough."
Mathew Staver, who created the Florida conservative Christian legal group Liberty Counsel, told the AP, "Every time the citizens have voted on marriage, they have always sided with natural marriage. Maine dramatically illustrates the will of the people, and politicians should wake up and listen."
But to others, the tone and content of TV and radio ads that were seen as ""fear mongering" had more to do with the outcome. Moreover, equality advocates adopted the argument now working its way through the federal courts that denying same-sex families equal legal validation is contrary to the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of equality.
"The results in Maine underscore exactly why we are challenging California’s same-sex marriage ban," said Chad Griffin, who heads up the American Foundation for Equal Rights. "The U.S. Constitution guarantees equal rights to every American, and when those rights are violated, it is the role of our courts to protect us, regardless of what the polls say."
Blogger and longtime civil rights activist David Mixner authored an emotional Nov. 4 post in which he wrote that he would "do my best to share my deep beliefs and not out of anger or fear like the people who insist that we continue to create a system of Gay Apartheid in America, before going on to declare, ’Enough!’"
Mixner faulted government leadership for what he said was a nascent system of "Gay Apartheid," writing, "All over the place, this nation is creating one set of laws for LGBT Americans and another set for all other Americans. That is the classic definition of Apartheid. Either our political allies are for Gay Apartheid or against it. If they are against it, they must fight with us and no longer duck like President Obama did in Maine and Washington. There is no half way in fighting Apartheid."
Mixner went on declare, "President Obama standing on the sidelines in Maine and Washington was appalling. The failure of our national organizations and leaders to demand his involvement was equally appalling."
Mixner also decried a ballot initiative system that allows rights and freedoms to be decided by popular vote. "The entire concept is repugnant and disgusting," Mixner wrote. "That we for the last three decades have been drawn into this game of ’this is politics’ and fighting these ballot box horrors so that maybe by in five, ten or twenty years we will have enough victories to force our federal government to protect our freedom is simply not acceptable anymore. Imagine the good we could have done with all that money. Imagine the civil rights movement we could have built if we had the leadership that was willing to think out of the box and put it on the line."
In an MSNBC interview, gay writer and columnist Dan Savage assigned blame to Obama, who Savage said was "AWOL" in the Maine struggle to preserve marriage equality; recalling Obama’s promise to be a "fierce advocate" for GLBT equality, Savage dismissed Obama’s vow, saying that the preisdent "osn’t doing squat."
Savage also noted the narrowness of the vote, which he suggested was telling, considering how "rural" and "Catholic" the state is.
The Catholic church took an active political role in overturning the state legislature’s provisions for gay and lesbian family parity.
In a Nov. 4 analysis, The New York Times noted that equality proponents seemed to have all the advantages. They had more money to spend on their campaign, and the plain fact that a majority of New England states have extended marriage parity. But Maine has a reputation for being "libertarian," a characteristic that other news sources identified as "contrary" or "unpredictable." As a result, the New York Times article said, politicians may be skittish about embracing equality for gay and lesbian individuals and their families.
Indeed, the state-by-state approach, initially envisioned as a slow but steady means to gain national across-the-board equality, may no longer suit an increasingly angered and impatient gay community. The Times quoted former Clinton administration advisor on GLBT issues Richard Socarides: "The state-by-state strategy that looked clever a few years ago has run its course. The states that were easy to get have been gotten."
Moreover, the state-by-state approach is vulnerable to the ballot initiative process, which is seen by some as a least-common-denominator means to short-circuit the process of legislative deliberation. Lambda Legal’s marriage project director Jennifer C. Pizer told the New York Times, "They tend to marginalize the group that is being targeted and inflame people’s passions in a way that is at best divisive and at worst terribly cruel. Our founders did not intend to allow a majority to take basic rights from a minority."
Kilian Melloy reviews media, conducts interviews, and writes commentary for EDGEBoston, where he also serves as Assistant Arts Editor.
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