What supporters of marriage equality should do now

Andrew Sullivan has some good advice:

I totally understand the anger, hurt and pain now roiling the gay community and our families, especially in California. But it's important to keep our heads. I've been in the middle of this fight for two decades. It's important to remember that we have never had this level of public support for marriage equality before. In eight years in California alone, the majority in favor of banning marriage equality has gone from 61 to 52 percent.

The next generation overwhelmingly backs the right to marry, and there is no sign of cultural reversal, even if we have suffered some electoral set-backs. If Obama has taught us anything, it is to keep our eyes on the prize, and not always to react impulsively to hatred, bigotry or simple ignorance by exaggerating its power over us. We are winning. We lost this one, by an excruciatingly small margin. But the whole point of this movement is education in support of toleration.

And some more:

My advice to the marriage movement: educate, speak, reach out. Stop the litigating. Resist the impulse to revel in victimhood. It may be justified and I certainly know how it feels, but it doesn't change any minds. That's what we have to re-focus on. And that's the only reason we have had the success we have had. Patience, diligence, charity: these are what a civil rights movement needs to stand for.

Good advice indeed. The ACLU and others have already filed a lawsuit claiming that Prop 8 was unconstitutional and too major of a change to bring about by a ballot measure requiring a simple majority. I can't comment on the chances this has. But I think that the best long-term strategy is the one that Andrew Sullivan has repeatedly emphasized in the quotes above.

I think it's important to look at the No on 8 campaign and try to learn from it. Sullivan and others have been critical of its "closeted" strategy:

Conventional wisdom maintains that the hide-the-gays strategy was good politics, but a) it insulted voters' intelligence on an issue that was not hard to understand b) it seemed desperate c) it suggested that gay marriage is, in fact, something to be ashamed of instead of an extension of normal family life and, of course, d) it didn't work. The political and cultural reality is that either people think it's OK for gays to get married, or they don't. And if they don't, they think this kind of discrimination is good--and completely different from the bad kind of discrimination. Besides, when you say the issue is "discrimination" and equate traditional limits on marriage to (now-illegal) racist practices, traditionalists can claim, without seeming crazy, the next step will be to outlaw even private, religiously based limits on marriage. Isn't that what we do with discrimination?

Ideally, we would persuade skeptics that gay marriage is good. But, at the very least, we need to persuade them that it's not bad. A lot of people are still in the muddled middle on this issue. They just need more evidence and more experience. As hard as it may seem right now, gay families need to be more, not less, public about their lives.

I, too, was struck by the complete absence of gay and lesbians couples from No on 8 ads. In fact, their ads rarely even mentioned same-sex marriage. I can only imagine that this strategy was reflected in other campaign efforts, as well, like phone banking, canvassing, and so on. It does seem like good politics on the surface, but it does reinforce the idea that there's something scary and different about same-sex marriage. This has to be corrected.

Johnny California has some good observations about the No on 8 campaign, as well. First, he says that the anti-Mormon campaign is counterproductive and has to stop. I agree. Second, he argues that 1) there needs to be a unified message, 2) we need to use the Democratic Party infrastructure better, 3) we have to work with rather than against religion, and 4) we need a better "ground game." The whole post is worth a read.

Blaming African Americans has to stop. Now. Yes, exit polls suggest that they voted no at a much higher clip than other racial and ethnic groups. But they made up only 10% of the electorate and Prop 8 would have passed without them. We have work to do with African Americans, and maybe it starts with African American churches. I don't know. But the racist stuff has to stop.

Finally, we just need to keep listening to the voices of those most affected:

As someone who just recently married his partner I felt last night's result personally. Despite all the rationalizations I can make, it is in fact hard to look at my fellow citizens today knowing that a majority of them that showed up to vote voted to prohibit my partner and me from enjoying the same legal approval for our relationship that they take for granted. All I can do is be grateful for Obama's victory and the long-term promise of national healing it represents.

We can do this. We can fight for marriage equality in the right way.