Prop 8 Deja-vu: Early Alarm Bells Ringing in Maine's Discriminatory Marriage Campaign

This is very depressing to read. This means that the anti gay marriage people are likely to win again. They don't fuck around, and they know how to get things done.

What I don't understand though, is why, every single time there's one of these kinds of things on the ballot the pro-gay side is ALWAYS in disarray, can't seem to figure out how to make an ad or organize volunteers (WTF? is it that hard to find people who know how to do this? no it is not) and in the end, we have a big ol' FAIL with horrible ramifications.

In the 1990s, there was an attempt to put a gay rights intiative on the ballot in Washington State, where I was living, and it seemed to fall victim to similar problems. I'm all for defending Maine's law, but I'm not going to give money to a campaign that can't seem to figure out Campaign 101.

Then again, what do I know? I've only been doing campaigns since 1992...sigh.

well let's hope things improve. I can't tell you how ill it made me to sit there at the AAPC and watch those Yes on 8 people gloat about how great they fucking were.

There are so many differences between Maine and California - the fact that Maine's polling is better than California's ever was; the fact that this ballot campaign follows a four year education campaign which culminated in a victorious legislative campaign, the fact that the population in ME is so small that we can talk to every single voter in the state and do not have to rely as heavily on mass media as CA did, the fact that Maine's elected officials are invested in defending this law. Remember, Maine was the first state to pass marriage equality legislatively and where a governor signed - a Catholic governor, no less. I think Maine's got it together.

As far as the ad itself, I can tell you that it is based not on intuition but on data; we know who we need to reach and what we need to say to them. And I would point out that these are not actors; and that the ad prominently features gay couples, young and old, including those with kids. The couple that gets the longest shot is the male couple with kids. We've put Maine's gay couples front and center for the past four years, and we've found that it works. Having said all of that, an ad is not a strategy - it's part of a strategy. I hope this context helps.

Carisa Cunningham
Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (www.glad.org)