Comments Elsewhere

“We’re not going anywhere. Push back. Push back.”

I couldn’t agree more. We’ve been resting on our laurels for too long, with many of us assuming that we won the culture war back in 1992 and from here on out we don’t have to worry about such matters as democratic politics, because it’ll all work out somehow. I hope that if anything comes from the late unpleasantness, it’ll be the recognition that that was wrong, wrong, wrong.

In every voter initiative and referendum campaign dealing with gay rights issues, we’ve been on the “NO” side—NO on special exclusion from anti-discrimination legislation, NO on banning gay marriage, etc. Why are we always on the defensive, and why aren’t we pushing for our own initiatives and demanding the kind of laws that we want made? The Right has been following this strategy for years now because they know that (i) it energizes their base and boosts grassroots turnout, (ii) because of (i), it’s often effective, and (iii) it allows them to pose as the mainstream while painting gay rights advocates as being afraid of democracy. But there’s no law (yet!) that says only the Christian Right can petition for voter initiatives. So what are we waiting for? There are good laws that need to be made at the state level—including bashing under hate crimes laws, including sexuality and gender identity in antidiscrimination laws, and so on. Nearly half of the states in the country let us bypass lobbying and go directly to the people on these issues.

What are we waiting for? Let’s get started.