Opinion: New Approach Needed to Advance Gay Rights

(Dec. 3) - In the immediate aftermath of the passage of California's Proposition 8 last fall -- where voters amended the state's constitution to recognize only marriages between one man and one woman -- there was a lot of finger-pointing in the gay community, but no bloodletting.

Leaders of all the major gay organizations kept their jobs, including the leader of the one organization dedicated to promoting gay marriage and the head of the leading gay rights group in the Golden State. Well, Patrick Sammon, head of Log Cabin Republicans, did announce his retirement, but he was resigning for personal reasons and no one was blaming him for Proposition 8's passage.

Last month, when Maine became the 31st state to reject state-recognition of gay marriage at the ballot box, gay leaders put on their best game face, pointing to voter approval in Washington state of domestic partnerships, but didn't wonder, at least not publicly, if their own leadership was to blame.

So, with the New York state Senate on Wednesday rejecting legislation that would have recognized same-sex marriage in the Empire State, don't expect heads to roll among the local or national gay leadership.

Now, to be sure, gay leaders in the Golden State did engage in a lot of soul-searching after their failure at the ballot box. They did try to understand what went wrong and map out a way forward.

But their January "Equality Summit" in Los Angeles and various forums across the state included the same sort of folks who've populated previous such conclaves -- representatives of a variety of ethnic and religious communities with political views that ran the gamut from liberal Democrat to radical socialist. They didn't see fit to include any Republicans.

That has to change. With Democrats increasingly supporting gay marriage, there is a growing need to reach out to Republicans if gays hope to have winning campaigns down the road.

In New York, 24 of the 32 Democrats in the New York Senate voted for state recognition of same-sex marriage; none of the chamber's 30 Republicans did. If just eight Republicans had changed their votes, the measure would have passed. In California, if just one in 10 Republicans in California had voted the other way, Proposition 8 would have been defeated.

You'd think gay leaders would want to hear from someone might know how to communicate with Republicans -- and have a few ideas about changing their minds.

Popular misconceptions of Republicans in the gay community notwithstanding, most of us are not beholden to the "religious right." Many of my straight fellows in the GOP could change their minds on gay marriage -- if the right argument is made. Indeed, at the Republican National Convention last fall, nearly half of the delegates supported either gay marriage or civil unions for same-sex couples.

But the current gay leadership doesn't have experience working with Republicans. Their background is in left-wing activism and Democratic partisanship.

The defeat of gay marriage legislation Wednesday in the Empire State is a clear sign that we need a new strategy on gay marriage. And we need new leadership to implement that strategy, one better suited to reaching out to citizens to whom the existing gay leadership has been loath to appeal.
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B. Daniel Blatt founded the Log Cabin Republican Club of Northern Virginia and blogs at GayPatriot.net.