Protesting Prop 8 in Downtown Los Angeles
It was a fine Saturday, if a little hot for mid-November. Better than cold and rainy, I suppose. We lazed around the house until it was too late to go to the nearest Metro station, so we had to drive down to get there in time to meet up with a few friends.
There were a few lonely anti-gay protesters, but they were countered, and shouted down, by a bigger line of anti-Prop-8ers.
We found a bit of shade.
Shiloh joined the straight allies in our midst, while Morgan reveled in his first protest in decades.
Now that people have had a chance to work on their protest signs a bit, I think they’re doing a bang-up job making them poignant, funny, and clever.
I’m not sure what will result from this. These carefully planned, mapped, and cordoned off protests are great for angry homos letting off steam, but they’re not inconveniencing the public, and I don’t know if they’re getting anyone to change their mind about their Prop 8 support. We have a far bigger problem, and that is the education of would-be tolerant Yes-on-8ers. Maybe the amendment will be overturned. I’m not holding my breath. But we’ll still have an uphill struggle against prejudice and discrimination. Perhaps we’d be better off continuing to change one mind at a time, staying visible and reaching out to those who don’t know any gay people.
It was the coming out movement that changed minds. People who railed against the evils of homosexuality suddenly discovered they had a gay person in their own family, and it made empty much of the desperate, hysterical rhetoric they’d been fed by their church leaders and ignorant bigots. We need to keep reminding those who voted against same sex marriage out of fear that we want the same legal protections from the state they do, no more, no less. We need to demonstrate that we value our relationships just as much, that despite years of struggle to obtain the tiniest scrap of governmental recognition we held on to our partners just as tightly, and cared just as much as they did for theirs.
We need to keep showing that love isn’t any different in gay or straight relationships. We need to demonstrate not just with our signs and our shouts, but with our hearts.