Marching for Marriage

In Semantic Nonsense I provided my views on just how opposed I am to this whole issue of denying marriage to a class of people based on whom they wish to marry.

I do, however, think that some supporters of gay marriage are serving their cause poorly with all of this marching and civil protest right now. It is not that I don’t support their cause, I just think that they should wait until they could march in favor of something instead of marching against the California majority vote. I don’t think you persuade people by protesting what they did, and recent polling suggests that they are driving more voters away from their cause than they are drawing to it.

Gay marriage supporters dropped the ball on Proposition 8, assuming that it would fail because polling on the issue before Prop 8 was introduced indicated that a small majority of people in California did favor gay marriage. They didn’t get out to support their cause until it after they had lost their momentum and Prop 8 proponents had already stolen the advantage from them with a massive and massively dishonest advertising campaign, and they then were floundering and never quite found a message that would resonate with voters.

Some demonstration simply reminds the public of the issue, and when it has that flavor I am all in favor of it. Some expresses disappointment with the outcome, protest against the result. If the protest were against a court ruling that would be one thing, but this decision was a vote of the majority of fellow citizens. Marching in protest of how unfairly they have been treated by the those voters, and blocking the City Clerk’s office in protest of a popular vote are messages that are unlikely to resonate with large numbers of California voters.

It would, in my opinion, be far better to regroup and come back with a positive message to get behind, rather than this endless chant of negativity. I, for one, would like to California be one of the states that recognizes the right of all of its citizens to marry the person of their choice.