Marriages, Hoses, and Dogs: California Will Defeat Anti Marriage Equality Ballot Measure in November

By Bob Mulholland
California DNC Member
Campaign Advisor
California Democratic Party

History is full of interesting facts and trends.

Sometimes the trends, created by important events, are not realized until decades later.

“Authorized Segregation” in the South went on for over 100 years after the US Civil War (1861-65). Southern whites practiced it openly, while Northern whites ignored it.

In the 1950s and 1960s marches, demonstrations sit-ins against segregation were held all over the South. The US Supreme Court’s unanimous decision (5/17/1954) against school segregation (Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas) was a very significant act. Tragically some people in the South responded as they had for 100 years – with brute force – beatings, jailings and in many cases – murder.

But television was the new force in town. Viewers all over America saw images of people being beaten with billy clubs or knocked down by fire hoses turned on full-force, and even German Shepherd dogs biting people.

Most Americans were both embarrassed and disturbed. The allied nations and Communist Bloc countries broadcast these images of America at its worst.

Ultimately Congress passed and President Lyndon Johnson signed both the Civil Rights Acts (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965).

Without those TV images, Congress may have waited another decade or two before acting.

In California, the State Supreme Court just ruled (4-3 on May 15th) that marriage is for all.

There is a Republican initiative on the November 4th ballot which would overturn this decision by amending California’s Constitution to declare that “marriage is only between a male and a female.”

We will defeat this measure -- and here’s my early historic view of what has changed since 2004, when Bush Jr. and the Republicans placed similar measures on several state ballots, helping many Republican candidates.

Only four years later, it is a different story.

Maybe this very tactic – Gay Marriage Ban by initiative – used by Republicans for the 2004 campaigns, actually got millions of Americans, post election, to rethink their attitudes on the subject.

The Field Poll (5/28/08) reported that for the first time in its decades of polling in California, a majority of California voters approve of gay marriage, 51% to 42%, with Democrats at 65% approval and the overall 18-29 age group at 68% approval.

And both the TV images and newspaper photos of smiling couples tying the knot, first from Massachusetts and now from all over California (will we soon hear of prenuptial agreements for some of these new couples?), will have a big impact, by making millions of people again reanalyze their views.

Getting a wedding invitation from a granddaughter marrying her former college roommate certainly will spur her grandparents to rethink their 1950s views.

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