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  Too Sad Over California's Prop 8

  Posted Wednesday, November 05, 2008 11:42 AM | By E.J. Graff

  Despite all else—the good news, for instance, that South Dakotans rejected harsh restrictions on women's uteri, and Colorado laughed at the idea that a fertilized egg is a person—let me just add how deeply sad I am that in Proposition 8, California's 38 million people decided, 52 percent to 48 percent, that two women or two men should not have their marriages recognized by the law. In the last few weeks, when the polls got close, I was extremely worried. The much-discussed Bradley effect may not actually exist, but a "homo effect" does. When LGBT issues go up for a popular vote, that vote has usually run about four points more against us than pollsters predict. The (barely) good news is that the effect has shrunk: The result was only 2 percent worse than predicted. But a loss is still a loss.

  There's lots to say, and maybe I will pull out of my sadness and say it another time. Important to remember that California is an enormous and complicated state, more populous than Canada, as diverse as the nation politically. For instance, it has the largest Mormon population outside Utah and a large evangelical megachurch base. Its vast poor and rural stretches have opinions that differ greatly from those of San Franciscan liberals. And so while some counties went overwhelmingly in favor of retaining same-sex marriage, the more conservative counties went overwhelmingly against. Men were against same-sex marriage while women were 50-50; younger people were (overwhelmingly) for same-sex marriage while older people were against.

  I am sad even though I know that, in 20 years, that vote will go the other way—maybe even in 10. Much sooner than that, I believe, some other American state will join Massachusetts and Connecticut (and Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain—and, as of last spring, Norway) in opening up the M-word to same-sex pairs. And I am sad even though this wasn't a total rejection of same-sex unions: California's domestic partnership law is the equivalent of Vermont's civil unions, as comprehensive a set of recognitions and protections as you can get, short of the M-word itself—and California voters have let that stand.

  Still, it stings to be told that your ability to love is not worthy of the word marriage. You can commit yourself for life, raise children together, pray over your sick beloved's body in the ER, or have the same argument for years about whose relatives you visit on Thanksgiving, but get the state's recognition that it's a real marriage? Nope. It's painful.

  Guess I'm staying in Massachusetts—where my neighbors are still overwhelmingly proud to be first—after all.

  Filed under: election '08, LGBT rights, same-sex marriage, proposition 8

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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