Today, we got to peek into two venues of the inner political sanctum of the unholy coalition that was forged to publicly smear and defame gays, while making pretenses to 'protecting marriage and children'. I agree with Shannon Minter it would have been a good day to televise.
Just as the lid is coming off the international coalition, including The Family, who pushed Uganda into consideration of laws to execute gays, we got a small peek at the internal-external Prop8 documents that show an astonishingly broad religious-political army and, perhaps, even rank hypocrisy, within the "moral" leadership council (what else am I to make of an election-morning e-mail entitled, "Go to confession", on face?).
Second, we got a first-hand account, a peek into NARTH, the evangelical spiritual-violence center run by Focus on the Family.
We got a first-hand view of the abdication of many (Blankenhorn, too?) of the birthright of gay kids, offered in public testimony by Ryan Kendall, despite any reasonable fear of reprisal and 'irreparable harm':
A. When I was 16, I separated myself from my family and surrendered myself to the Department of Human Services in Colorado Springs.
Q. And what happened when you surrendered yourself to that department?
A. I -- I went in, and I spoke with the case worker. And I told her what had been going on in my family, what had been going on with reversal therapy. And I told her that if I went back to that house, I was going to end up killing myself.
And so they started a dependency and neglect proceeding to revoke my parents' custody.
Q. So did you stop living with your parents and stop going to therapy?
A. That's correct.
Q. And did things get better?
A. I was a 16-year-old kid who had just lost everything he ever knew. I didn't really know what to do. I was very lost. And so the next few years I wandered in and out of jobs. I wandered in and out of attempts at school.
I was incredibly suicidal and depressed. I hated my entire life. At one point, I turned to drugs as an escape from reality and because I was, you know, trying to kill myself.
So, no, things did not get better.
Q. And what happened when you surrendered yourself to that department?
A. I -- I went in, and I spoke with the case worker. And I told her what had been going on in my family, what had been going on with reversal therapy. And I told her that if I went back to that house, I was going to end up killing myself.
And so they started a dependency and neglect proceeding to revoke my parents' custody.
Q. So did you stop living with your parents and stop going to therapy?
A. That's correct.
Q. And did things get better?
A. I was a 16-year-old kid who had just lost everything he ever knew. I didn't really know what to do. I was very lost. And so the next few years I wandered in and out of jobs. I wandered in and out of attempts at school.
I was incredibly suicidal and depressed. I hated my entire life. At one point, I turned to drugs as an escape from reality and because I was, you know, trying to kill myself.
So, no, things did not get better.
In case there were still some white-washed tombs left, or cold-hearted judges yet to come, or people who justified their foot-dragging by neatly separate buckets of discrimination, Boies offered up two more pieces of expert testimony, from Katherine Young and from Paul Nathanson. Nathanson testified to a long string of professional groups (including Anthropological) that endorse marriage for committed gay couples and as good for the kids of gay couples. He testified that "hatred" was cultural hostility, not just "an emotion". Young testified that the same 'protect the children' trope was used by religious groups to oppose the women's movement.
THE POLITICAL ARMY OF GOD
Professor Gary Segura, a political scientist, spoke about an 'expert report' that he had prepared for the trial. He gave various theories about how gays could be visible, but lack political power. For instance, the new mayor of Houston, a lesbian, cannot get domestic partner benefits, because those have been denied directly by the voters, via referendum/plebiscite. He talked about the special case of plebiscite, which links local with national opposition. On cross, he talked about gay political action groups overstating their influence to donors. Asked about the recent Federal Hate crimes law signed by the President, he said it was a 20 year goal achieved, but it still had to be attached to the must-do Defense Authorization bill, afterwhich it still lost 75% of GOP support. [I did not check his numbers.] He spoke about the use of persuasion as a "weakest form" of political power.
There was a long list of other topics. Frank Kameny and the Mattachine society. Colorado's Amendment 2. Prop 187 in CA. How the amendment process has been used to target minorities, in general. He guessed at 0.005% of local officials were gay and circa 1% of state officials (445 is the total number offered on cross for all office holders). Far too much to recap. The role of the Judiciary in prompting legislative changes. Disposable income. Access. Lobbyist awards...National AIDS/HIV strategy. The ACLU, the TV set, the NYT, the HRC's claim to have reached 90% of the US population with a message, legislative scorecards, labor unions,
Some real courtroom tension came, however, when Plaintiffs tried to start introducing documents from the Prop8 campaign.
From the documents that made the cut we learned:
- 20,000 LDS-related volunteers walking around, at one point, on a Saturday
- conference calls, one with 1,700 listeners in 101 locations in June, 3000 in July and a goal of 5,000 (!!!)
- kick off letters from the First Presidency of the LDS
- "The Pastor's rapid response team"
- the heretofore unknown involvement of a polling specialist who was actually a point-person within the campaign for organizing "public affairs"
- "John Does" who are yet to be named
- An election morning e-mail that has a subject line, "Go to confession"
- The Catholic Conference "Led by the Knights of Columbus national donation of $1.15 million, other million-dollar donors, and countless major donors,"
- tax-law troubles in spades: "As you know from the first Presidency letter, this campaign is entirely under priesthood direction - in concert with leaders of many other faiths and community groups forming part of the ProtectMarriage.com Coalition."
- "We have the political and financial support of groups such as Focus on the Family, Family Research Council, American Family Association, The Arlington Group, and many others."
THE COURT: Does losing elections or failing to obtain legislation denote political powerlessness to require extraordinary protection against majoritarian political processes?
THE WITNESS: Losing an individual election, in my view, would not because in the Democratic process someone losses all contests.
The initiative process, however, is a little bit different because it is the only circumstance where we put individual rights up to a popular vote.
So we have 150 or more instances in a decade and a half where anti-discrimination protections are voted on by the population and overturned, even though the legislature or its city council or county board had granted them.
We have uniform passage of constitutional amendments to exclude one group of citizens from a civil institution. And that's extraordinary, in my view.
Now, does -- would each individual act by itself be determinative of whether or not there should be judicial intervention? I would say, just as I said to Mr. Thompson, that an outcome by itself is a piece of information, but we would want to know the context in which it passed.
So if we look at the passage of a particular bill in the Assembly, if we have the passage of a bill where the majority party votes for it and the minority party votes against it, then we might reasonably expect that should that majority change, we could see a reversal on that. We could contrast that with an outcome which is bipartisan, for example.
We can see examples where a legislature passes a bill and the public then files an initiative to overturn it.
So I would want to look at the range of events rather than a single event. And in my view when you look at the range of events that have occurred in terms of the, you know, public voting directly on questions of gay and lesbian rights, that their loss rates suggests that longstanding prejudice against gays and lesbians is shaping what their political opportunities are.
THE WITNESS: Losing an individual election, in my view, would not because in the Democratic process someone losses all contests.
The initiative process, however, is a little bit different because it is the only circumstance where we put individual rights up to a popular vote.
So we have 150 or more instances in a decade and a half where anti-discrimination protections are voted on by the population and overturned, even though the legislature or its city council or county board had granted them.
We have uniform passage of constitutional amendments to exclude one group of citizens from a civil institution. And that's extraordinary, in my view.
Now, does -- would each individual act by itself be determinative of whether or not there should be judicial intervention? I would say, just as I said to Mr. Thompson, that an outcome by itself is a piece of information, but we would want to know the context in which it passed.
So if we look at the passage of a particular bill in the Assembly, if we have the passage of a bill where the majority party votes for it and the minority party votes against it, then we might reasonably expect that should that majority change, we could see a reversal on that. We could contrast that with an outcome which is bipartisan, for example.
We can see examples where a legislature passes a bill and the public then files an initiative to overturn it.
So I would want to look at the range of events rather than a single event. And in my view when you look at the range of events that have occurred in terms of the, you know, public voting directly on questions of gay and lesbian rights, that their loss rates suggests that longstanding prejudice against gays and lesbians is shaping what their political opportunities are.
