M Ghandi called for a one day strike in India – just to show the power behind the message. He shut India down, comletely without violence – empty roads and empty offices – and gave the Brits food for thought.

I understand the turnout wouldn’t include the entire state’s population, but even a smallish percentage would be significant on a couple levels. first, just the numbers of people not in the office that day would give an idea of the numbers of people that are being discriminated against. But it would also show that these are the very people you work and play with every day – that you may have known for years.

In any case, just as you say, if they actually got thrown out then that would be good publicity.

I don’t think working to take the word “marriage” away from heterosexual unions, either in the courts or through legislation, is a winning strategy.

I don’t know much about California law. Do you have to collect all the signatures before you present the idea of the ballot measure?
I strongly suspect the first two measures would be tossed out as superfluous – then we could make sure the reason they were tossed out got lots of publicity. If the process didn’t require the whole 700K signatures first it could be a very quick and powerful response.

And on your comment of only needing to peel off 3% more voters – the margin changed from over 22% to under 4% in eight years. The mere passage of time (as more people who grew up in a more reasonable world grow up and can vote) will shift the vote. Not to mention all those people we can hope will find themselves with “buyers’ remorse” when they realize they’ve legislated against their neighbors based on a pack of lies.

The more I watch the behavior of the “Yes on 8″ supporters the more I’m convinced their true fear is that without Proposition 8 they would be forced to acknowledge that there are thousands and thousands of loving, committed same sex couples rather than retaining their image of miserable people living a “lifestyle” of drugs and promiscuity. Just why this scares them eludes me, except perhaps that, like their fear of reasonable sex education for adolescents, it reduces their ability to control others.

Thanks, I was pretty sure it would need to be filed, and I agree that it is a much more radical restructuring, but it does seem logical based on my understanding of the ruling. I would prefer marriage, but would accept equality for all under any name.

I realize that would be a radical concept, but it would be in keeping with the intent of Prop 8 and leave the court’s ruling intact. T

One intriguing (and hopeful) wrinkle of the “Yes on 8″ campaign is that they never showed a same-sex couple in their ads, nor did they ever talk about lesbian and gay couples. This is because many “swing” voters on gay ballot initiatives don’t want to think of themselves as bigots. So “Yes on 8″ told them, again and again, that this isn’t a vote to hurt gay people; it’s a vote to protect the children! It’s a vote to protect churches!

If there’s no legal barrier, then a ballot measure — or a series of ballot measures — could call for:

1) An explicit constitutional right for parents to opt out of having their children taught about same-sex marriage in public schools, and

2) An explicit constitutional right for religious institutions, and religious officiants, to decline to host or perform same-sex wedding ceremonies, without any legal penalty or any loss of tax status.

3) Removing proposition 8’s language from the California constitution.

The down side is, it’s pointless, legally — all those rights already exist in California. The “Yes on 8″ people are lying when they say otherwise. And let’s face it, it’s galling to have to defer to this garbage in order to have justice. But politics are like that.

The up side is, it would cut the anti-marriage movement’s most powerful arguments off at the knees. Yes, they’ll switch to other nonsensical arguments — but the reason they chose these arguments is that they’re the most powerful arguments they’ve got. If they had anything better, they would have used that instead.

Remember, we only need to peel off 3% of voters or so for a victory, so every voter pealed off their side counts. If there are a lot of swing voters who were persuaded to vote for proposition 8 because of the “protect the children/churches!” argument — and that’s certainly what the “Yes on 8″ organizers believe — then taking those arguments away could change the outcome.

At the very least, the more the “Yes on 8″ proponents are forced to argue that gay couples are bad, the more their true natures will be revealed. That’s worthwhile in and of itself.