AMERICA:Same-sex marriage rejections could force a much-needed rethink of gay campaign tactics
ACROSS THE United States today, thousands of gays and lesbians will take to the streets with their straight allies to demonstrate against the latest setback to the campaign for same-sex marriage rights.
Last week, voters in California, Florida and Arizona approved bans on same-sex marriage and Arkansas voted to forbid gay couples from fostering and adopting children.
The California vote was especially painful because it reverses a state supreme court ruling that upheld the constitutional right of gay couples to marry.
Marriages contracted before last week's vote are unlikely to be affected and Connecticut this week opened the door to gay marriage, but equal rights campaigners fear that, if they can't persuade Californians to support their cause, they have little hope of success anywhere else.
Some gay commentators highlighted exit poll data suggesting that 70 per cent of Californian African-Americans backed the ban and a few pundits launched intemperate attacks on the black community as homophobic.
Blaming African-Americans for the result makes little sense, however, given that only 6 per cent of Californians are black.
It also ignores weaknesses in the pro-marriage campaign, which failed to target black voters or to reach out to religious leaders who oppose discrimination against gays.
Many black gays and lesbians feel alienated from the mainstream gay movement, which they see as dominated by affluent, white activists who are pursuing an ever narrower agenda.
Jasmyne Cannick, a black lesbian, outraged some gay pundits last Saturday when she wrote in the Los Angeles Timesthat nobody had successfully communicated to blacks why they should care about gay marriage above all other issues.
"The way I see it, the white gay community is banging its head against the glass ceiling of a room called equality, believing that a breakthrough on marriage will bestow on it parity with heterosexuals," she wrote.
"But the right to marry does nothing to address the problems faced by both black gays and black straights.
"Does someone who is homeless or suffering from HIV but has no healthcare, or newly out of prison and unemployed, really benefit from the right to marry someone of the same sex?" she asked.
Most gays want equal marriage and partnership rights but some are questioning the almost exclusive emphasis the gay movement puts on the issue. Marriage inequality affects all gays and lesbians insofar as it is a symbol of second-class citizenship.
In practical terms, however, it has an impact on fewer people than, for example, employment discrimination.
Marriage equality has moved to the centre of the gay agenda as the movement itself has moved to the right and a vocal group of conservative gays seek to decouple their fight for equality from that of other minorities.
Many conservative gay activists in the US venerate the memory of Pim Fortuyn, the assassinated Dutch far-right politician who used his gay identity to claim that his anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim campaign was about protecting liberal values.
The gay rights movement in the US, like its counterparts in Germany and Britain, has its roots within a broader progressive agenda. Harry Hay, who founded the Mattachine Society in 1950, was a communist and in the 1970s, the Gay Liberation Front formed an alliance with the Black Panthers.
The Stonewall riots that launched the modern gay movement were led by transvestites, a group today's gay conservatives view with some distaste.
The campaign for marriage equality has often appeared to make its case on the basis that gay and lesbian couples are "normal", so effeminate gay men and masculine lesbians, for example, have been pushed to the sidelines. The California campaign took this timidity to a new level of absurdity by initially running ads that didn't feature any gay couples at all, leaving it to their mothers to demand equality on their behalf.
The large, impromptu protests that followed last week's vote in California suggests that the latest setback could become an opportunity for gay activists to regroup, rethink their strategy and restore alliances with other campaigns for justice.
The fight for marriage equality will continue but last week's rejection in one of the most liberal states in the US should persuade campaigners to present it in bolder, more exclusive terms. Gays and lesbians don't deserve equal rights because they are normal, but because we are human.
