CA Voters - What you can do to repeal Prop 8 in 2010

[essentialsaltes]

Sign the Petition to get it on the ballot. Even if all you can do is to print out the PDF, sign it yourself, and mail it to their offices, that's a stamp well spent.

Comments

Re: 2012

[shad-0.livejournal.com]

WARNING: I am about to reveal myself as the racist bigot that I truly am.

Plus I think you'll want people to be coming out for the Presidential election as well.

A substantial number of persons who historically did not vote registered for and voted in the 2008 election. The vast majority of these new voters were members of minority groups. As the Wall Street Journal reported: "About five million more people voted for president in November than four years earlier, with minorities accounting for almost the entire increase. About two million more black and Hispanic voters and 600,000 additional Asians went to the polls."

Before the election, the New York Times noted that strong minority turnout might actually help pass Proposition 8 in California, because minorities are "traditionally conservative on issues involving homosexuality." As one of the campaign managers for Yes on 8 said: "There's no question African-American and Latino voters are among our strongest supporters. And to the extent that they are motivated to get to the polls, whether by this issue or by Barack Obama, it helps us."

According to exit polls, these minorities did in fact vote overwhelmingly in favor of Proposition, resulting in its passage with a bare majority of 52.3% of the vote. The National Exit Pool reported that 70% of African-American voters had supported Proposition 8, while the Public Policy Institute of California reported that 61% of Latino voters voted in favor of Proposition 8 and that "57 percent of Latinos, Asians, and blacks combined voted yes." (Interestingly, according to the both the NEP and the PPIC, Caucasian voters were apparently split almost 50%/50%.) Of course, these exit polls are always open to question: the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute has concluded that only 58% of African-Americans actually voted for Proposition 8.

Whatever the exact figures, it's clear that minority votes were a key factor in the passage of Proposition 8. Given the much higher than usual minority turnout in 2008, I think it is not unreasonable to assume that there might be another such higher than usual minority turnout in 2012... and that there might not be one in 2010. So I'm not so sure I'd agree that waiting for a Presidential election year is such a good idea.

Re: 2012

[essentialsaltes.livejournal.com]

WARNING: I am about to reveal myself as the racist bigot that I truly am.

Awesome, I knew Maria had good taste!

Re: 2012

[shad-0.livejournal.com]

:-p

(In all seriousness, though, I am making a generalization about people based solely on their race and a single data point...)

Re: 2012

[ladyeuthanasia.livejournal.com]

Honey, how can this turn from a popularity contest into a civil rights issue, like Virginia vs. Loving? It has to be taken away from The People, who are obviously regardless of color too stupid and selfish to live.

Re: 2012

[essentialsaltes.livejournal.com]

Until my benevolent dictatorship gets underway, 'we the people' still have the final say, even if it takes a constitutional amendment to get something done.

Re: 2012

[ladyeuthanasia.livejournal.com]

But civil rights can't be determined by the popular vote, hence the Loving vs. Virginia case. There was some abysmal number of people in favor of interracial marriage then -- like 18%? I don't recall the exact statistic I heard on NPR but, if left to The People, interracial marriage would have been illegal for a lot longer.

Re: 2012

[essentialsaltes.livejournal.com]

Judges can overturn laws if they are in conflict with the state constitution, but the people can change the constitution. Indeed, that's precisely what prop 8 did.
In the case of interracial marriage, the federal consitution was involved via the 14th Amendment, but that too can be changed by the people.

Re: 2012

[ladyeuthanasia.livejournal.com]

Okay, NOW I remember. Thanks. :)

Re: 2012

[ian-tiberius.livejournal.com]

I referenced this just now in my other post, but just to clarify: race is a suspect class under the equal protection clause. Sexual orientation isn't. That's why Loving v. Virginia was decided appropriately, but the Fourteenth Amendment would not apply to a comparable suit involving gay marriage.

As for why race is a suspect class and sexual orientation isn't: it's because the people who passed the Fourteenth Amendment understood and intended it to apply to race and not to sexual orientation. You can't simply extrapolate a principle and extend it to encompass somebody else simply because you feel it ought to. That's the same shit the fundamentalists pull when they say that the founders put "In God We Trust" on the currency and made provision for a congressional chaplain, therefore this is a country founded on Christian principles and we should have prayer in schools.

In 1868 the country got serious enough to amend the Constitution to give equal protection to people of all races; there's no reason why the people of 2009 shouldn't be obligated to amend the Constitution again if we want to grant that level of protection to people of all sexual orientations.

Re: 2012

[essentialsaltes.livejournal.com]

As for why race is a suspect class and sexual orientation isn't: it's because the people who passed the Fourteenth Amendment understood and intended it to apply to race and not to sexual orientation. You can't simply extrapolate a principle and extend it to encompass somebody else simply because you feel it ought to.

My ignorance is fairly profound here, but [plays with wiki for a minute] isn't your statement assuming that "original intent" is *the* way to interpret the Constitution? Rather than, say, a textualist interpretation that suggests that when the 14th Amendment says "any person" it means "any person".

Okay, okay, yes there is significant precedent behind the concept of "suspect classes" and who the Supremes have put in that category. But, in the end, they get to make that decision, not the people of 1868, right?

Re: 2012

[ian-tiberius.livejournal.com]

Sure. But if there are two ways to interpret the law, SCOTUS usually tries to go with legislative intent.

The principle here is simple: it's never been the case under the law that a person could marry another person of the same gender, so if you want that to be the law now, then it should happen through the recognized process of amending the law, rather than the judiciary "discovering" a new right.

If the ideological balance of the Court swings (farther) away from my own beliefs, I don't want them suddenly discovering new rights for those I disagree with. (Like organized prayer in schools, for example.) So I can't in good conscience support this just because I happen to agree with the goal. Our system of government is designed to fundamentally resistant to change, and this is a virtue, not a failing.

Re: 2012

[shad-0.livejournal.com]

I know we've disagreed about this before, but I'll do it again: There is not one word in the Fourteenth Amendment limiting it to race. The Thirteenth Amendment outlaws slavery (albeit also without explicit reference to race); the Fifteenth Amendment prohibits denying someone the right to vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude"; but the Fourteenth Amendment contains no such limitation. The applicable sentence in section 1 reads:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The U.S. Constitution guarantees equal protection to every "person" -- not to every black person, or to every brown person or white person or green person or heterosexual person, but to every person, period. Homosexuals are unquestionably "persons"; to the extent that prejudiced bigots can vote to deny equal protection to homosexuals simply because they outnumber homosexuals, the U.S. Constitution can and should prevent it. (Whether it will prevent it depends largely on whether the United States Supreme Court is ready to consider homosexuals a traditionally disadvantaged group, as we have previously discussed.)

And to counter your argument that those who drafted and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment were thinking of race and nothing else, I again remind you that the equal-protection clause is also the basis for overturning governmental discrimination on the basis of gender, despite not saying a word about it. (See Reed v. Reed, 404 U.S. 71, 92 S.Ct. 251, 30 L.Ed.2d 225 (1971), in which a unanimous Court held that the equal-protection clause applies to governmental discrimination on the basis of gender; Craig v. Boren, 429 U.S. 190, 97 S.Ct. 451, 50 L.Ed.2d 397 (1976), in which the Court applied stricter judicial scrutiny to gender-based discrimination ["To withstand constitutional challenge, previous cases establish that classifications by gender must serve important governmental objectives and must be substantially related to achievement of those objectives"], even though in that case the discrimination was against males rather than females; and more recently United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515, 116 S.Ct. 2264, 135 L.Ed.2d 735 (1996), in which the Court (with only Justice Scalia dissenting) struck down the University of Virginia's male-only admission policy as violating the equal-protection clause, because the government could offer no "exceedingly persuasive justification" for the discrimination.)

HAHAHAHAHAHA!

[ladyeuthanasia.livejournal.com]

As a matter of fact, I do!

Re: HAHAHAHAHAHA!

[essentialsaltes.livejournal.com]

Oh man... I flubbed my line.

"I knew Maria was a woman of discriminating taste."

Re: HAHAHAHAHAHA!

[ladyeuthanasia.livejournal.com]

I do like that one better. ;)

Re: HAHAHAHAHAHA!

[shad-0.livejournal.com]

*thwap*

Re: 2012

[ian-tiberius.livejournal.com]

Whatever the exact figures, it's clear that minority votes were a key factor in the passage of Proposition 8.

Actually, a lot depends on which figures you rely on.

Let's go with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute report you cited. They conclude that African-Americans comprised 7% of California voters in 2008 and 58% of them voted for Prop. 8.

Working backwards from their numbers (see Table 1), if we assume that every African-American in the state had skipped the election, Prop. 8 would still have passed with 50.5% of the vote.

Or, to put it another way: AAs comprise about 6.2% of California's population. I cannot find demographic information I consider reliable from the 2004 or 2006 elections, but let's be generous to your theory and say AAs comprised perhaps 5% of the electorate in those years, surging to 7% in 2008. What you're talking about, then, is 2% of the electorate being slightly (58% vs. 50.5%) more likely than the rest to vote for Prop. 8, compared to voters in a non-Obama year. That shifts 7.5% of 2% of votes...for a difference of a 0.15-percentage-point shift in the final tally. So Prop. 8 passed with 52.3% instead of 52.15%.

Now, granted, if the National Exit Pool is right (that AAs were 10% of the electorate and 70% of them voted Yes) then these numbers change, and increased AA turnout shifts the final tally by almost a full percentage point. So - why go with the NGLTFPI report over the National Exit Pool?

Simple: the National Exit Pool is a traditional exit poll, taken by intercepting voters as they leave their polling places. These polls have huge margins of error, affected by factors such as which polling places your interviewers stake out (Pacific Palisades or Inglewood?) and the race/sex/age of those interviewers (old white people are more likely to stop and be interviewed if the interviewer is also old and white, etc.)

The NGLTFPI report, by contrast, relies on a survey conducted after the election by contacting voters selected at random from voter registration lists. While this method has its own biases (they presumably contacted those voters by phone, which tends to skew results slightly older and miss the very poorest demographic; people may change their minds post-election and convince themselves they voted differently than they really did) I think most experts would consider this methodology significantly more accurate than outside-the-polling-place exit polling, which is wildly unscientific.

In short, even the more compliant data only indicates a shift of about one percentage point in the final vote tally, and the data I find more convincing indicates a shift of more like fifteen-hundreths of a percentage point. Now, let's weigh that against waiting an extra two years.

According (again) to NGLTFPI, voters 65+ were 23% of the electorate in 2008, and 67% of them voted for Prop. 8. According to the CDC, the annual mortality rate for the 65+ population is about 5.1%. So about 10% of those old coots will kick it between 2010 and 2012.

They will be replaced by voters just coming of age, who will presumably roughly match the views currently held by the 18-29 demographic. (According to NGLTFPI, 45% of them voted for Prop. 8.) Using the same math as before, this shifts (2.3% * 22%) the final tally by half a percentage point.

And that's not taking into account other voters whose views towards gay marriage may soften during those two years. I daresay if we graphed polls on favorability towards gay marriage over the last ten years, we'd find it increasing in support a hell of a lot faster than a quarter percentage point a year.

Anyway, the long story short is that I think the minority turnout effect is pretty minimal, and certainly more than offset by expected changes in opinion over time amongst the electorate, even before we take into account the other factors I mentioned in my previous post which seem likely to bolster the strength of the pro-8 crowd in an off-year election.

/wonk

Re: 2012

[ladyeuthanasia.livejournal.com]

You forgots the brown peoples!

Re: 2012

[ian-tiberius.livejournal.com]

Well, I didn't forget them. I left out Asians and Hispanics for two separate reasons.

Asians, according to pretty much all sources, voted in almost exactly the same proportions as whites. (National Exit Pool has both at 49-51; NGLTFPI has them at 48% yes-on-8 to whites' 49% yes-on-8.) So any shift in Asian turnout has negligible impact on the end result.

But what about Hispanics? According to the data I prefer (the NGLTFPI report), they voted about the same as AAs, but in twice the numbers. Sounds significant, but recall that the question is - essentially - whether or not they turn out in bigger numbers for Obama here in California, and I haven't seen that evidence. National Exit Pool has their share of the vote down (18% of the electorate in 2008 compared to 21% in 2004), so if anything this suggests that Obama depresses their turnout (or at least doesn't energize them as much as he energizes other groups), and that would actually offset the (tiny) effect of driving more AAs to the polls.

(Of course as noted earlier I don't trust NEP's polling methodology, but I can't find a source I find convincing for 2004 and 2006 that compares apples to apples. If anyone can and it demonstrates that Hispanic turnout in California was up in 2008 compared to 2004 or (better) 2006, then I'm happy to re-evaluate.)

Re: 2012

[jedifreac.livejournal.com]

The Asian American Californian voting bloc is pretty damn weird; I don't know if I would underestimate it. While some of the population is insular, religious, and conservative, that doesn't apply to the entire population. (And more of the religious and conservative members of the population aren't registered voters.) From Prop 22 to Prop 8, California moved 14 percentage points in support of marriage equality. Asian Americans moved 30%. Although this wasn't the exit poll result, a separate survey before the election found 57% of APAs against Prop 8. I think this is something that the 2010 campaign could capitalize on--particularly hauling young Asian American voters out to vote. That's good news for both 2010 and 2012.

As for the other minority outreach, let's just hope that the campaign runners have the foresight to engage all groups this time around. Sheesh. Unfortunately, the public face of the LGBT community is overwhelmingly white. And at some of the post-election rallies racial slurs were being tossed around. It's a lot to examine and a lot of hearts and minds to change. I'm still not entirely convinced changes through elections are a solution.

Re: 2012

[ian-tiberius.livejournal.com]

As for the other minority outreach, let's just hope that the campaign runners have the foresight to engage all groups this time around. Sheesh. Unfortunately, the public face of the LGBT community is overwhelmingly white.

I know thefayth has a lot to say about this.

I'm still not entirely convinced changes through elections are a solution.

I am.

First of all, changes imposed by the judiciary against a popular majority are bound to be viewed as illegitimate, and that sets up feelings of victimization and potentially decades of struggle. Roe v. Wade is an excellent example - if that issue had been left to the legislature, I don't think we'd have had thirty-some years of culture war over it or abortion providers getting shot.

Second of all, it's not appropriate for this to be imposed by judicial fiat. Equal protection doesn't apply; the Supreme Court doesn't believe that full "suspect classification" applies to homosexuals, and to be blunt, they're right. The people who passed the Fourteenth Amendment most assuredly did not intend to grant homosexuals the right to get married. The judiciary is intended to protect the rights of minorities, but for the courts to strike down 8 on equal protection grounds would move beyond protecting rights and into granting them, which is (and should be) the prerogative of the legislature.

I believe in gay rights; but I believe even more strongly in not trying to evade and abuse the rules laid out by our Constitution even more. I don't stand for it when the other side does it, and I'm not going to condone it when our side tries the same thing. The ends do not justify the means.

Gay rights need to come from the legislature, from an electoral initiative, or from a constitutional amendment. That's the only way they will be legitimate, and that's the only way they're going to last.

Re: 2012

[jedifreac.livejournal.com]

Okay. I never said the court was the answer. I said it was one the two most popular tacks at this time. There are other venues. There's supposed to be some sort of legislative effort to repeal DOMA, too. It's just not a legislative priority right now.

changes imposed by the judiciary against a popular majority are bound to be viewed as illegitimate, and that sets up feelings of victimization and potentially decades of struggle

I suppose it would depend on how high profile the case is. I'm thinking of other examples like Brown v Board and Lawrence v Texas. Timing appears to be an important factor on those, too.

Equal protection doesn't apply; the Supreme Court doesn't believe that full "suspect classification" applies to homosexuals, and to be blunt, they're right.

Actually, sexual orientation is considered a suspect classification in the State of California, which should factor into the Boies/Olson challenge against Prop 8. Not to mention Boies/Olson are also going to be hammering in on the gender discrimination angle ("The, wait, so a man can marry a woman, but I can't?" thing)...While gender isn't suspect classification it demands slightly more scrutiny than sexual orientation. This lawsuit will definitely advance this argument one way or another. I think the case for Equal Protection just might work out for the better, even if it doesn't work. You're welcome to disagree.

They're also going to be heavily pushing the Due Process angle. Given how Lawrence went down that's probably a more likely sell, though there is a huge chance this court case could catastrophically backfire.

Re: 2012

[ian-tiberius.livejournal.com]

Actually, sexual orientation is considered a suspect classification in the State of California, which should factor into the Boies/Olson challenge against Prop 8.

I don't see that being relevant at all - the Boies/Olson challenge is in federal court, not California court, so they must be challenging this on U.S. Constitution grounds, on which California's classifications have no bearing. Am I missing something?

Gender discrimination is easily dismissed. Each gender has the right to marry someone of the opposite sex, therefore they have parity. Next issue.

I don't see the due process argument either. In Lawrence v. Texas that basically boiled down to saying that whether or not people should be having gay sex, the government doesn't have the right to do the investigation necessary to find out or prove it. Marriage is a public act, recorded by the government by definition, so I don't see how you could apply the same logic.

And tactically, if the ACLU thinks the Boies/Olson lawsuit is dumb and will backfire, I'm disinclined to second-guess them.

Re: 2012

[jedifreac.livejournal.com]

Not everyone in the ACLU thinks it will fail. I've talked to people in the ACLU on this suit and there are a lot of varying opinions.

Here's Boies's take on the lawsuit. Feel free to hack it to bits.

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/20091101_Yes__It_is_a_fundamental_right_under_the_U_S__Constitution_.html

Re: 2012

[dogofthefuture.livejournal.com]

That's okay, because I'm an ageist bigot, and I think a much bigger difference will be made, numbers-wise, by waiting for more old people to die. Which means maybe it's best to wait until 2014 or even 2016, actually. But that would suck. So 2012 is the best compromise.