SSM Advocate Admits Prop 8 Voters Not Haters

And he admited the voters were actually more in favor of Prop 8 than the vote indicated. David Fleischer had a commentary in the Los Angeles Times analyzing the vote for California’s Proposition 8, with the hope of eventually repealing the California Marriage Amendment. He mades some surprising admissions. Fleischer headed the LGBT mentoring project, which is now part of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center's new leadership program Learn Act Build.

Immediately after Proposition 8 passed, many who supported [neutering] marriage tried to make sense of the results.

Here's the sense: Most people, even if they retain no disapproval of homosexual behavior, understand that marriage unites the sexes, and that the state has an interest in marriage that it doesn't have with other kinds of voluntary personal relationships. Also, they don't like the judiciary usurping their authority.

A set of assumptions gained wide acceptance. Some are correct. Most, however, are just plain wrong. And it's crucial that we know what happened in the last election before launching another attempt to legalize marriage for all.

For all? Really? Even for a bisexual who is in love with two people at the same time?

But it was interesting that a marriage neutering advocate is finally got serious, rather than simply blaming a church headquartered in Utah and in which a tiny percentage of California voters hold membership.

One big question after the election: Who moved? Six weeks before the vote, Proposition 8 was too close to call. But in the final weeks, supporters pulled ahead, and by election day, the outcome was all but certain.

Maybe the polls were wrong.

The shift, it turns out, was greatest among parents with children under 18 living at home - many of them white Democrats.

Parents - unless they have deluded themselves to deal with the guilt of actively deciding to raise children without their parent of the opposite sex in the home, or the guilt of making a series of poor choices that ended up with the same result – can see that a child is best off with a mother and a father who are married to each other. A mother realizes that she can't be a father, and a father realizes that he can't be a mother. They see masculine traits in boys from the earliest ages, and feminine traits in girls at the earliest ages.

Among the array of untrue ideas that parents could easily take away: that impressionable kids would be indoctrinated; that they would learn about gay sex; that they would be more likely to become gay; and that they might choose to be gay.

What parents correctly realized was that neutering state marriage licensing would make it much more difficult to fight the devaluation of marriage and the advocacy of homosexual behavior in public (state... duh) schools; it would be much harder to opt their children out of anything that taught the demonstrable falsehood that homosexual behavior is equal to heterosexual behavior. Based on the past actions of homosexuality advocates, this was a reasonable consideration.

Another misconception was that those who voted for Proposition 8 were motivated by hate.

Read that again. Over and over again. It contradicts the claims of the marriage neutering advocates in the federal trial over Prop 8. But it comes a little late, doesn't it?

Yes, they turned out to be susceptible to an appeal based on anti-gay prejudice.

Please explain how that was ant-gay prejudice. It wasn’t a prejudgment. It wasn’t anti-gay. Where did any of the ads imply that homosexual people were bad? It is possible that a signifcant perecentage the population has considered the differences between the sexes and a union that brings together both and one that doesn't.

It's true that the official election results — 52% to 48% — appeared quite close. But the truth is more complicated. The data we analyzed show that the No on 8 campaign benefitted from voter confusion.
Polling suggests that half a million people who opposed [neutering] marriage mistakenly voted against the proposition. They were confused by the idea that a "no" vote was actually a vote for [neutering] marriage.

And let’s not forget that as people mature, marry, and have children (preferably in that order) they are more likely to see the importance of marriage and the difference between marriage and other kinds of relationships. That means, despite what the hateful comments typically say after pieces like this, you can't count on marriage supporters to die out.

"SFNative" at 1:23 AM August 3, 2010:

To Lc39B1, if you don't agree with homosexual marriage, then how about you leave me alone and focus on your own self.

As we have pointed out numerous times, it is actually the marriage neutering advocates who are not leaving other people alone. It is a little silly to insist how vitally important this issue is and then turn around and ask us why we care so much.

State marriage licensing is a public issue as the licenses are issued on behalf of the people of the state. You are free to share your life, name, and bed with anyone else – to have your ceremonies and ask others to consider you married. But forcing the rest of us to call it marriage? That’s another matter.
"bertthebear1" at 3:32 AM August 3, 2010:

You are being replaced by young voters with a much more progressive viewpoint. People who have grown up with Gay classmates and Gay relatives, perhaps a Gay parent, teachers etc. and realize we are normal.

I grew up with classmates, teachers, relatives, etc. who identified as homosexual, and some of them were strange (just as some straights were), but others were fairly normal is most aspects of life. I still don’t see something as marriage if it is missing either a bride or a groom.

People who understand that we have separation of church and state in this country and that religious views are not a basis for making civil laws.

People are allowed to vote for their own reasons. And we did.

This is a civil rights issue. We pay taxes and we are entitled to all of the same rights and benefits as everyone else and that includes the right to marry the person of our choice whether the same or opposite sex.

If a heterosexual person can get a marriage license with someone of the same sex, then yes, you'll have to have that access too. Which makes me wonder – if a heterosexual person had sued over Prop 22, would the marriage neutering advocacy groups have supported that? Would the California Supreme Court have made the same decision? Or does a heterosexual person not have the "right" to marry someone of the same sex?