It may not be what the LGBT community wants to hear, but Equality California Executive Director Roland Palencia was quite blunt on a conference call with reporters last week when he acknowledged that should the referendum to overturn Senate Bill 48, the FAIR Education Act, make it to the ballot, we will lose.
"The prospects are not good if this gets to the ballot," Palencia said. "I am not under any illusion."
Right now the anti-gay groups that spearheaded Proposition 8 are gathering signatures to get the SB 48 referendum on the ballot next year. They have until October 12 to collect 504,760 valid signatures. According to EQCA and its coalition partners, much of that work is currently taking place in churches – no surprise there – but the prospect of hired signature gatherers sprouting up outside big box stores in the final push is very real.
We noticed something on the EQCA conference call, which included coalition director Andrea Shorter and communications director Rebekah Orr: there's no robust unified strategy to keep the referendum from qualifying or what to do if it does. There needs to be one message to meet the opposition. If we've learned nothing else from the Prop 8 fiasco, it's that our side was disorganized, afraid, and timid.
Palencia later clarified his comments, but still maintains – correctly – that any ballot fight over SB 48, which would require public schools to include factual, age-appropriate information about the contributions of LGBT people and people with disabilities, will be extremely difficult. Orr acknowledged that the coalition has yet to find the "silver bullet" on overcoming the fear factor that the homophobes are quite adept at instilling in straight parents, especially mothers.
Since that August 25 call, EQCA has gone on the offensive. This week it issued a video of the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins's message to fundamentalist churches in which he rails against the "propaganda" of SB 48 and how it will force teachers to "advocate" for behavior they find morally objectionable." EQCA also points out that the Family Research Council has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and addresses Perkins's lies and misinformation. We don't recall that happening during the Prop 8 campaign, and it's a noticeable improvement in strategy.
"We are realistic about how difficult this campaign will be, how hard it will be to win," Palencia said in his clarifying remarks that were sent several hours after the call. "But we also know that even if we start way behind, a loss is not a foregone conclusion. From our starting place our chances may not look good, but I don't believe it is impossible."
One of the problems for the coalition is apathy within the LGBT community over this issue. It was hard to get folks to call Governor Jerry Brown's office when he was deciding whether to sign the bill, while reports circulated that the right wing had ramped up its effort with calls urging Brown to veto the measure. So it seems that EQCA and its partners need to energize their base by telling LGBTs why it's important to stop this referendum. At least the Perkins video is a good start.
Of course, it would be best if the referendum failed to qualify in the first place. But EQCA's slow start at mounting a vigorous decline to sign campaign, coupled with lackluster fundraising to support it, has hurt. There is doubt about the effectiveness of decline to sign campaigns, but an attempt would have started a public discussion on the issue. EQCA has yet to distill anything resembling a quick, 10-second sound bite, which is about all the time one has to convince someone not to sign a petition.
So as we head into the final six weeks of the signature gathering effort, we hope EQCA continues to aggressively combat the distortions made by the Stop SB 48 side. But that alone will not be enough to win this campaign.