Hey everyone, only one more part after this. I will try my darnest to try to get tomorrows blog up at the earliest convenience because I am leaving for Florida and not sure if I will have wireless at the place I am staying. But not to worry, I will go to a local coffee shop if I have to.
The Anti-Gay-Marriage Propaganda Effort
The Players
That the organized opposition to gay marriage is primarily from groups with an obvious homophobic agenda should be self evident if one looks at who they are and what they are doing outside of the arena of the gay marriage debate. That many of them call themselves "Christian" does not, in any way, relieve them of the responsibility for the fact that preaching hate is still preaching hate, even when the hate is dressed up in the form of religious doctrine. Putting lipstick on a pig does not make it any less a pig.
These are some of the most respected religious organizations in the United States. One of the most persistent and vigorous players is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, better known as the Mormons.
It was the vigorous organization and strong fundraising effort by the Mormon church that raised approximately 70% of the money that came into California from out of state, to push the campaign for Proposition 8, a ballot measure that amended that state's constitution to prohibit gay marriage and even the recognition of gay marriages performed elsewhere.
Other players were the usual suspects, the Catholic church, several of the more conservative Protestant denominations, the American Family Association, Focus On The Family, their various political subsidiary groups, and a whole host of smaller right-wing political and religious organizations, including a few out-right hate groups. The Southern Poverty Law Center maintains a watch on many of these groups.
The Tactics
What these groups do, persistently, is to try desperately to legitimize what is clearly a campaign of hatred, fear and disinformation. The people of California saw that recently, when the campaign for Proposition 8 used just that tactic relentlessly, for months on end, spending millions of dollars in the process. Eventually the fear and disinformation campaign took its toll, emotion overtook reason, the majority in favor of gay marriage slowly eroded, and the proposition passed rather narrowly.
Hatred by itself, dressed up as religious dogma has been used for so long that it is beginning to lose its effectiveness (eventually people begin to figure out that it is mostly a tactic for filling pews, collection plates and campaign coffers more than it is a way of reforming lost souls and improving society), so the more clever of these organizations have begun to move onto a slick propaganda effort based on that long-time favorite winner, fear.
Of course, the all time favorite among those fear mongering tactics is that logical fallacy called the slippery-slope argument, described briefly earlier. One sees the slippery-slope fallacy in almost every one of their arguments, because they have few logically sound arguments to which to resort.
Take, for example, one of the most popular anti-gay-marriage web sites out there, one so frequently clicked-on that it frequently comes to the top of Google results, the "Ten Arguments" page at nogaymarriage.com (as retrieved on 6/3/09). This web site is operated by the notorious American Family Association, run by Donald Wildmon, and one need only read that organization's Wikipedia entry (in its entirety) to understand just what kind of organization is behind this page. Among those "ten arguments," the slippery-slope fallacy (often more than one) can be seen clearly in every one of the ten. But for every slippery slope argument that Wildmon's organization has identified here, there is not a shred of verifiable evidence given for even a single one. That is a clear demonstration of just how logically fallacious those arguments are - no evidence, just disinformation, just fear mongering.
Gay marriage has been a reality for two decades in Denmark, nearly as long in one form or another in several other Scandinavian countries, and for several years now in Canada, and in the form of civil unions in several states in the United States. Can anyone point to civilization collapsing (as was alleged would happen in the recent Proposition 8 campaign in California) or students being taught gay sex in the public schools (another frequent allegation from that campaign)? If twenty years of gay marriage in Denmark has not brought about the collapse of civilization in that country (indeed, it remains higher on the United Nations Development Index than does the United States), I doubt that the collapse of civilization will be brought on in the United States by a couple of dudes saying "I do" - but that simple reality doesn't stop the argument from being made.
Fear always has the effect of nullifying reason, and does so reliably - so all one has to do to nullify a logical argument is to instill fear. As for any of the other arguments raised against gay marriage, an examination of what has happened during the last twenty years in that country and other Scandinavian countries that followed suit shortly thereafter, will show that the fears are misplaced and the slippery slope so greatly feared remains remarkably ungreased.
The easiest way to counter the slippery-slope fallacy is to simply point out that gay marriage has been tried in many places in the world for many years, including the United States, and none of the dire effects insistently predicted have yet occurred to any significant degree.
The Strategy
The anti-gay-marriage campaigners have recently been losing in the courts with increasing frequency. It isn't difficult to understand why. It is hard to argue that gays, unable to access the dozens of rights of marriage available to straights (as identified by the Supreme Court of the State of Hawaii), have equal protection of the law, when they clearly do not under any reasonable standard of logic, and so the courts have been ruling that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. constitution, and similar statutes in state constitutions mean that the rights and responsibilities available to straight married couples are due to gays as well, and have struck down numerous state laws forbidding gay marriage. As a result, the anti-crowd has been losing in the courts. Simply putting a measure on the ballot, or getting a law through the legislature to overturn such decisions has not worked, because they run afoul of state constitution requirement for equal treatment under the law, and are therefore promptly struck down again.
So the response has been to place ballot constitutional amendment initiatives on the ballot in the states that allow for that. To date, more than half of all states have passed such initiatives, and in every case, the initiative campaign was based on fear, disinformation and hate mongering. Hardly a surprise, when an appeal to logic is not available to them, so an appeal to emotion, especially fear, is their only alternative.
An additional advantage to the constitutional amendment approach is that it is court-proof. For all intents and purposes, an amendment to a state constitution is by definition, constitutional, and can't be overturned as unconstitutional by a state supreme court, at least under most ordinary circumstances.
Gay marriage is a hot-button issue. There is no doubt about that. And because it is, the strategy is often used to put a gay-marriage initiative on the ballot when interest in an election important to the right is otherwise flagging. It gets out the homophobe vote quite reliably, so when right-wing candidates are behind in the polls, a gay marriage ballot measure is often used as a way to also raise the participation and push a right-winger into office when he would otherwise have lost. Conversely, when there is a hotly contested race between a liberal Democrat and a conservative Republican, interest in the race is often used to get out conservative votes for a gay marriage ballot measure which may otherwise lose.
Once on the ballot, the disinformation used in the campaign consists of nearly always variations on the same arguments regardless of where the campaign is taking place, nearly all of them lies, generally easily refuted and can be easily seen to be without merit: 1) that homosexual sex (and/or gay marriage) would be taught and promoted in the public schools; 2) that heterosexual marriage would be undermined; 3) that churches would be forced to sanctify gay marriages; 4) that the underpinnings of western civilization (presumed to be heterosexual marriage) would be threatened; 5) that gay married couples would recruit, recruiting especially any adopted children who would then grow up to be gay. It doesn't matter whether these claims are true or not for this disinformation campaign to succeed; as Adolf Hitler himself noted, all it takes for a lie to be believed is for it to be repeated often enough, especially if it is a big lie, and these campaigns repeat the same lies over and over and over again until they finally become conventional wisdom. But there is a looming problem for the anti-gay-marriage crowd. That is the United States constitution, whose 14th Amendment states that all persons are entitled to equal protection of the law, and it makes no exceptions for gays, as the U.S. Supreme Court itself noted in its ruling striking down state sodomy laws. So if straights are entitled to special treatment for being married, gays are, in theory at least, due those same treatments under the 14th Amendment.
Stay tune for the final part tomorrow.
MJ
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