Update (from Autumn): Below the fold: The Courage Campaign’s statement on the “Explosive Courtroom Documents” discussed in the courthouse today.

Apparently, similar statements to the rally’s statements were presented in documents to the court today.

UPDATE 2: Below the fold, points from testimony of Gary M. Segura, Ph.D., Professor of American Politics in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University.

Just in from Yusef Robb of the  American Foundation for Equal Rights — key quotes from the Prop 8 campaign’s simulcast rally that was shown in court today. It’s priceless.  Man-on-horse, pedophilia and incest hysteria claims are made about marriage equality.

I’m glad all of this is going on the record — again, the basic concept of CONSENT is nowhere to be found among these people.  

“Then pedophiles would have to be allowed to marry 6-7-8 year olds. The man from Massachusetts who petitioned to marry his horse after marriage was instituted in Massachusetts. He’d have to be allowed to do so. Mothers and sons, sisters and brothers, any, any combination would have to be allowed.”

“Second of all, the polygamists are waiting in the wings because if a man can marry a man and a woman can marry a woman based on the fact that you have the right to marry whoever you want to marry, then the polygamists are going to use that exact same argument and they’re probably going to win.”

“We are seeing the people of Massachusetts being desensitized day by day concerning homosexuality and becoming more and more adjusted to the idea of homosexual marriage being the law of the land and the homosexual agenda becoming more and more of a powerful element in the life of our society.”

“I think a helpful way to think about this is to compare it to 9/11 cuz a lot of us are asking-How does this directly affect us? Well I wasn’t directly affected by 9/11 and my guess is most of you weren’t either in the sense I didn’t know somebody who crashed the plane in the building. I didn’t know somebody who was in the building. But after 9/11 the world was a fundamentally different place and that has affected me. The change in the redefinition of marriage is the same type of thing.”?


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 26, 2009

Contact:

Cathy Renna, 917-757-6123, cathy@rennacommunications.com

Aidan Crawford, 323.969.0160, aidan@couragecampaign.org

EXPLOSIVE DOCUMENTS EXPOSE PROP 8 CAMPAIGN AS TRIAL PROCEEDINGS NEAR DRAMATIC CLOSE

JACOBS: “This evidence is not just a smoking gun. It was an arsenal of incendiary devices directed at the LGBT community and voters. This is how the Prop 8 side won — through fear and lies.”

Courage Campaign media release: Explosive Documents Expose Prop 8 Campaign As Trial Proceedings Near Dramatic CloseSAN FRANCISCO, CA —  Rick Jacobs, Chair of the Courage Campaign Institute issued the following statement on the Prop 8 campaign videos and documents introduced into evidence this morning in the Perry v. Schwarzenegger trial. The new evidence shows how the Prop 8 campaign tried to link marriage equality to incest, bestiality, pedophilia and polygamy:

“This morning’s evidence made the Prop 8 side’s strategy crystal clear — use fear and lies to promote hate. It is horrifying that Prop 8 proponents would compare marriage equality to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and imply that marriage equality will open the door to pedophilia, incest and bestiality.”

“Ron Prentice, Andrew Pugno and their Prop 8 team — with the highly capable and apparently deeply cynical leadership of Frank Schubert — created a permanent campaign to scare voters into believing that same-sex marriage would threaten children, undermine America and lead to every form of illicit behavior imaginable.  ”

“This evidence is not just a smoking gun. It was an arsenal of incendiary devices directed at the LGBT community and voters. This is how the Prop 8 side won — through fear and lies.”

“Finally, this morning we saw indisputable, documented evidence in the form of emails and videos that Ron Prentice and Protect Marriage coordinated closely and relied upon the Catholic Church, the LDS Church, the Family Research Council, Maggie Gallagher, Brian Brown and the National Organization for Marriage to get Prop. 8 on the ballot and to win through a campaign of lies.”

“Last week, the Supreme Court erased decades of precedent by ruling that corporations have the same rights as people when it comes to speech. Let’s hope that the court will as readily see that LGBT people have at least the same rights as corporations and surely the same rights as other people.”

Via the Prop 8 Trial Tracker web site, the Courage Campaign Institute has brought the proceedings to the public in real time,, garnering more than 1.1 million views and helping fuel an online community of “Trial Trackers” posting more than 11,000 comments to date. To view the Prop 8 Trial Tracker, go to:

http://www.Prop8TrialTracker.com

The Courage Campaign is an online organizing network that empowers more than 700,000 grassroots and netroots activists to push for progressive change and equality in California and across the country. As a leading multi-issue advocacy organization in the progressive movement, the Courage Campaign’s work is made possible by thousands of small-dollar donations from community members.

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UPDATE 2:More from AFAR’s Yusef Robb:

Quotes from Gary M. Segura, Ph.D., Professor of American Politics in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University.

Dr. Segura was called by the plaintiffs to testify last week as an expert. Unlike defendant-intervenors’ witness Kenneth Miller, Dr. Segura’s expertise was unchallenged. Dr. Segura testified about the relative political power of gays and lesbians as a class of citizens, and their level of political vulnerability.

Below are excerpts from his testimony:

“Gays and lesbians do not possess a meaningful degree of political power.”

“They are not able to protect their basic interests and effectuate their interests into law and to secure those.”

“Relative to some other groups that currently enjoy judicial protection, gays and lesbians are actually, in the statutory and constitutional sense, worse off than some of those groups were when they were granted judicial protection.”

“They have essentially lost a hundred percent of the contests over same-sex marriage.”

“The initiative process has been really the Waterloo of gay and lesbian politics.”

“Initiatives have been used to roll back legislative gains by gays and lesbians over and over,” Segura testified.”There is no group in America….who’ve been targeted by ballot initiatives more than gays and lesbians.”

Segura noted that the gay and lesbian community has lost 33 of the 34 ballot measures across the country dealing with marriage.

(Note: the one “victory” was in Arizona, where the way it was drafted impacted health insurance. They changed the language the next year and it passed. So really, all have been lost -yr)