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Oh now this is a true delight. Protect Marriage Washington is the group trying to destroy vital legal protections for loving Washington families by repealing the Domestic Partnership Expansion Law of 2009. They’re attempting to do this via Referendum 71. They have a fairly moribund website, but on that website they’ve managed to post “R-71 Talking Points”. A much better term would be “BWAKing Points”.My comments are in green.
BWAKing Point Number 1
Homosexuals have a right to form meaningful relationships. They do not have a right to redefine marriage for all of us. Marriage is not a special interest!
Referendum 71 has nothing to do with marriage. It seeks to repeal a domestic partnership law. However, reserving a civil institution for one class of citizens is the very definition of special interest. Larry Stickney is in fact championing special rights for heterosexuals. He has yet to explain how permitting same-sex couples to have a domestic partnership redefines his marriage(s). Is he afraid he’ll be tempted to run away and get a domestic partnership with Stephen Pidgeon?
BWAKing Point Number 2
If Senate Bill 5688 is allowed to stand, Washington will immediately become subject to litigation by same-sex partners demanding the courts overturn our state’s Defense of Marriage Act and impose “same-sex marriage” (as happened recently in California prior to Proposition 8). By signing Referendum 71, we will bring this society changing measure before the people of Washington State and let them make this monumental decision in November.
The Washington State Supreme Court has already ruled that the state’s discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act is constitutional. Larry has yet to explain why he thinks the Court would agree to re-examine their former ruling. However, if he wishes to ensure that LGBT people stop bringing lawsuits challenging state-sanctioned discrimination, he should see to the repeal of discriminatory laws rather than to their proliferation.
BWAKing Point Number 3
Marriage is between husbands and wives so children can have fathers and mothers. James Dobson says that thousands of studies show that children raised in a family with both a mother and a father are healthier emotionally and physically than those raised in a non-traditional family.
Is Larry advocating for plural marriages, or is that just sloppy writing? Nothing in the civil marriage code mentions children as a reason or requirement for civil marriage. However I agree with him that it is ideal for children if their parents can marry or get a domestic partnership to form a more stable home. Why then is he putting up roadblocks to such stability for the children of gay parents? I can only conclude that Larry hates children and wishes to punish them for their parents’ sexual orientation.
Since we know that Larry promotes fake statistics, he needs to provide specific citations to support his claims. ”James Dobson said so” is a weak man’s lazy-brained argument. Who else besides James do you let think for you, Larry? If Larry cared about the welfare of children, he would cease telling the children of gay parents that their families are inferior, and he would ensure that their families were as secure as possible under the law.
BWAKing Point Number 4
Criminalization of free speech and “anti-bullying” laws follow the legalization of same-sex “marriage”. In a few short months after legalizing same-sex “marriage” in Canada, activists there successfully passed C-250, a bill criminalizing public statements against homosexuality, punishable by up to two years in prison! Pastors beware! The same will happen here in Washington.
Larry, you’ve got it ass-backwards. We had those laws long before we instituted domestic partnerships. Gays have been protected by Washington Malicious Harassment laws since 1993, by Washington Anti-Bullying laws since 2002, and by Washington Non-Discrimination laws since 2006. When, again, did you say this mass incarceration of pastors will happen?
What part of “1st Amendment” doesn’t Larry understand? The 1st Amendment guarantees that the few real Christian pastors remaining who don’t like gays can still freely vilify us from the pulpit. No state or federal law can trump the U.S. Constitution. Larry knows this, but his scam uses the fear factor as a motivator, so he’s got to drum up false fears whenever possible.
Vermont has had full civil unions for almost 10 years and marriage equality has been the law of Massachusetts for 5 years. Nobody has been thrown into prison for saying un-Christian things about gays in those states or in any other state with marriage equality, domestic partnerships or civil unions. And Larry, we live in the United States, not Canada. If you have to go to a foreign country to find scare material, you’re really reaching.
BWAKing Point Number 5
If same-sex marriage becomes the law in Washington, public schools K-12 will be forced to teach that same-sex “marriage” and homosexuality are perfectly normal. These books are required reads in Massachusetts and California: And Tango Makes Three, Heather Has Two Mommies, King&King, and Hello Sailor!
Schools will naturally choose to let children know that it is o.k. if some of their classmates have non-traditional families like Larry’s: stepmothers, stepfathers and assorted half or even unrelated siblings from past shattered marriages mixing and remixing into complex but undoubtedly very loving families. Children need to know that all loving families are equal, even if they’re the product of serial divorce and are dominated by fear-mongering twits.
Here are some useful materials to help you spread a little truth about domestic partnerships and Referendum 71, courtesy of Washington Families Standing Together.
* FAQ: Domestic Partnership Law
* Decline to Sign Handouts
Join Washington Families Standing Together in their fight against Referendum 71 by clicking on the graphics below.
Cross-posted at Washblog.
18 Comments
Thanks, Lurleen.This BS is beyond false. It’s totally STUPID!
And btw, I’ll really be rooting for you and doing whatever I can to help in WA. The “[your] family [has no] values [to us]” crowd is considering doing something similar in NV once SB 283 is implemented in October, so I really want to learn from you how we can run a successful campaign to protect our DP rights down here in Vegas.
I wonder….Back in the mid 1990′s, there was a group in Oregon called the OCA (Oregon Citizens Association, and offshoot of the old White Citizens Council that fell apart some years earlier), led by a guy named Lon Mabon. Washington State was working on passing anti-discrimination laws, and the OCA tried like hell to interfere with that, using pretty much the same arguments this group is using. There was a grassroots effort called Hands Off Washington that was successful in defeating the OCA’s attempts to manipulate Washington State politics.
I wonder if we should resurrect Hands Off Washington. It was everything you’d want a GLBT advocacy group to be-grassroots, volunteer effort requiring almost no budget that spread across the entire state very quickly and was able to reach even the most homophobic Eastern Washington towns and win just enough people over to defeat the OCA.
I also find it amusing that after 15 years, the attacks from the right have not changed substantively. Their arguments are the same, I’ll bet the same people are pulling the strings, too. Thankfully, these tired old canards are losing the appeal they once had, and it may be very soon that Washington State realizes Marriage Equality.
I do miss Washington State, and I look forward to moving back there someday. I’ve never seen a place with such beautiful landscapes or such beautiful people. If there is a heaven, it probably looks an awful lot like Seattle.
Keep on ‘em.Great rebuttal. Keep it comin’, Lurleen.
Fingers crossed for Nevada.I hope you don’t also have to face a referendum, but if you do just don’t let the opposition’s crap go unanswered. Rebut it loudly and often - so often that the average person can anticipate your replies.
Oooh I hadn’t heard of them!Thanks for letting me know – I’ll have to do a little research on the people and the “then and now” talking points. Could be fun…
ouch.I wonder too. . .Wow, Lon Mabon is certainly a blast from the past. The resurrection of Hands Off Washington would actually be a great compliment to Decline To Sign. Hands Off was extremely succesful. I remember when we couldn’t afford window signs & created an army of folks with dot matrix home printers & distributed the artwork on floppy disks to whomever we could get to print a few out.
We do Love our State, and continue trudging along towards equality.
I love your state tooAnd always will. I’ve lived in every part of the US except the Southwest and New England, and of every place I have ever been to or lived in, Western Washington is still the only place I consider to be home. I give every month to Equal Rights Washington, and contributed heavily to Governor Gregoire’s campaign to defeat Dino Rossi-both times.
No matter where I go, I will always be looking out for you, Washington State. No matter how many of them pop up, whether its Mabon or Rossi or Jim West, you know I’ve got your back. I’d say some cheesy shit about how I left my heart there, but the fact is, Washington IS my heart. Chin up there, it’ll get better soon. And I do look forward to the day I can come home again.
I don’t know if its ever possible to fall in love with a place, but if it is, then I guess I did when I lived there. And every time I see the Space Needle as I’m pulling in down route 90, I feel like I’m looking my lover in the eye again after a long time away.
That would make a great articleThe whole OCA vs HOW thing was a big deal in the mid 90′s, and the two organizations fought it out everywhere from the nightly news to billboards along I-5. And HOW turned up in the most surprising of places-even little tiny towns like Nighthawk, Wa (if you know where that is without looking it up, you are a hardcore Washingtonian) would have a little Hands Off Washington sign in the window of some little shop or somebody’s house. HOW really framed it well-by casting it as “Hate is not a Washington value” and “Who the hell is Lon Mabon to be coming here telling us we should hate our own?”, they managed to cast the GLBT population in Washington as part of the greater whole, and then threw in “An attack on even the smallest minority of Washingtonians is an attack on all Washingtonians”, and the effect was remarkable.
For example, Chehalis and Centralia, providing they haven’t changed much since I left-and I’d wager they haven’t-are not what you would call liberal by any means. There used to be a billboard some pissed off farmer had in his field along I-5 with a picture of Uncle Sam that would have some outrageous Limbaugh style over the top right wing bullshit on it. Not at all the kinda place you’d expect to feel welcome in as a GLBT person, right? Well, you’d find Hands Off Washington regalia there too-the townspeople didn’t really approve of homosexuality, but they were not about to let some Oregon asshole tell them how to run their state or to come there and start attacking Washingtonians-even gay ones.
HOW reframed the argument from “gay people bad” to “We take care of our own”. And they did it on almost no money, at pretty amazing speed, all across the state. And this was back before everyone had a computer at home and all you had to do was log onto Pam’s House Blend to see what was going on.
So yeah, doing a piece on the HOW vs the OCA and how that relates to today’s struggle would be pretty awesome. It’d certainly make oldsters like me proud to know that people still remember and care about what we did way back then
then and nowI, too, have fond memories of HOW. I was on the steering committee for the speakers’ bureau, and we trained bunches and bunches of volunteers to go out and talk in front of groups about LGBT rights. (One of my former trainees is now an organizer with NGLTF.)
Many in the community do remember what Hands Off accomplished, though we had a great deal of luck in that we didn’t have anything come to the ballot. The bigots weren’t able to get their signatures back then, just as they weren’t able to get them in 2006 when they attempted a referendum on our brand-new (after 30 years of trying) non-discrimination bill. And I’m hoping we have a lovely repeat of that scenario this year, and when we finally do pass a marriage bill in the state leg.
Unfortunately, Hands Off Washington lost its bearing after the big OCA fights, and against the wishes of many in the community, it pushed a pro-gay ballot issue, attempting to get a non-discrimination measure passed. We lost horribly at the polls, and the effort sucked all the resources out of our community that year. For a community that says rights don’t belong on the ballot to then put our rights on the ballot – well, it didn’t go over well.
Many of the Hands Off folks are still active, either with Equal Rights Washington or other groups. And ERW has much more pull with the legislature. We’re in pretty good shape now, and certainly the HOW legacy helped — but we need now to focus on bringing our existing groups together (as WAFST has done) and not creating additional groups, imo. As for the more conservative parts of the state, I’ve been impressed with how much Pride Foundation has done in those communities over the years. Another organization worth supporting, certainly.
off topicbut now I wonder if DaveB and I know each other.
Maybe soI first moved to Washington in February 1993, knowing only one person west of the Mississippi, with nothing more than an old beat up guitar and one bag of clothes and Grateful Dead bootleg tapes, enough money for a months rent and a map I’d picked up on the Greyhound Bus on my way into town. Lived in Tacoma for a while, then went to school at Evergreen-having left home as a teenager, going to college had been a lifelong ambition which I finally got to fulfill. Finally left the state in 2002 to join the Peace Corps, and only came back for a brief moment in 2004 to retrieve my things which I’d left at a friend’s house, and then ship off to do Americorps in DC and then later in New York, and now down here in New Orleans.
If you lived in Tacoma, and were at all into the gay scene there, or were involved in the Evergreen crowd in the late 1990′s, or used to hang out on the Ave late at night or over at Neighbors or the Blue Moon, or the 733 and the Spout N’ Toad in Tacoma, you might remember this crotchety bastard with faint drawl and hair down to his ass that used to talk about how he used to be in the Army but had a problem with authority and discovered he was a pacifist and dropped out to go chase the Grateful Dead around the country and get laid.
That would be me. The hair’s shorter, an there’s alot more wrinkles now than there used to be (who the hell did that happen?), but I’m sure if we knew each other you’d recognize me pretty quick.
an understatement:
I don’t think the effort was so bad, We did lose horribly at the polls, but it did lay the groundwork for todays advances. “it didn’t go over well” gave me a chuckle. We totally sucked rocks, but our hearts were in it.
I wasn’t suggesting the reformation of HOW, but this whole thing is reminiscent of Lon Mabon and how Washingtonians responded to him and his ilk after being exposed as carpetbaggers. ERW could take that page from the HOW pagebook and run with it.
ExactlyHOW’s success was that it promoted something that’s instinctive to everyone, the tendency to close ranks when attacked from the outside. What’s more, they emphasized the fact that GLBT people were part of Washington society, and that we were worth fighting for.
Now, I missed the whole failed ballot initiative part, which probably happened after I left Tacoma to go to Evergreen (for some odd reason everything got a little blurry after going to EverGreen… hmmm…), but I will say that the secret of HOW’s success came from the fact that they presented Washingtonians with an argument even ultra conservatives could get their heads around-someone from the outside was attacking Washingtonians and trying to turn us against each other.
And it worked. It appealed to the sovereigntist tendencies of the right and the egalitarian tendencies of the left, and brought Seattle coffee slurpers to the same table as Olympia hippies and Spokane rednecks.
How many GLBT movements can you think of today that are trying to bring Joe Six Pack (who was a character in a book by former Washington Governor Dixie Lee Ray) into the fold?
Hands Off Washington worked because it didn’t pit Seattle against Spokane-it pitted Seattle AND Spokane as a team against The Outsiders. And in doing so, they made GLBT people Insiders, all across the state
Exactly.
WellIt’s possible but I doubt it, although we shared the same goals.
I was a biz owner on cap hill & owned a restaurant on lake union. . .most likely a friend of mine was an instructor of yours at evergreen.
Well, shitTell that friend of yours I said hi
I did spend alot of time on Cap Hill, so its possible I may have stopped in at your business from time to time.
And even if we didn’t run in the same circles, that in itself is a testament to how effective HOW was in bringing Washingtonians of all kinds together to rally around a common cause. Even people who had nothing in common other than the state they lived in, people as different as you can imagine, we were all involved in that fight, because we all had a stake in it. HOW brought people inside from the fruit pickers in Wenatchee to the upper crust of Bellevue, and students at both Pullman and Bellingham had at least one thing in common with the longshoremen in Tacoma and Everett.
We were, if nothing else, Washingtonians. And that commonality is something I’d like to see the GLBT community look to create.
When the City of San Francisco started marrying gay couples, something very fundamental changed in the national consciousness. People would turn on the news, and at first, yes, they reacted badly. After a while, they noticed something in those pictures-if they looked at enough of them, they would eventually see a couple that looked like them. Straight laced, clean shaven and in a nice suit, or two schlubs in sweatshirts, Black, White, Asian, Hispanic, long hair short hair, young old… eventually, they found someone they could connect with.
That was accidental. Gavin Newsom didn’t plan on specifically what kind of gay couples he was going to let marry, he just threw the courthouse door open and invited all takers. HOW did the same thing, in a way.
And that’s what we need to do now.
Now, during the runup to Prop 8, I donated to EQCA regularly. After it passed, I called them up to find out why we failed. I asked about the statistic that showed that the largest demographic group that voted for Prop 8 was Black; I asked if there were any Black board members at EQCA. They had none. I asked if anybody in the office at EQCA was Black. Nobody. I even asked if they had attempted to do outreach to the Black community at all-they had, but the lady on the phone said it was so long ago she couldn’t remember exactly when, or how many people were there, or to which segment of the Black community it was directed.
That’s why we lost Prop 8. We can blame the Mormons, we can talk about those outsiders and the Orange Curtain… but the fact is, we fucked up.
HOW used a very broad brush, and brought the entire state into the game. EQCA couldn’t locate a single Black person in their organization when I called them. HOW succeeded. EQCA failed. see a connection? I do.
Made a wiki page for ithttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C…
super!