"Help me. I wish I could disappear and go away"... Graham Nash sang those lyrics. But we will not disappear nor will we go away. The passage of Prop 8 is a stark and stunning reminder of how much, as a community, we still need to do. We lost this fight. It wasn't the Mormons, it wasn't the Catholic Church, it wasn't the African-American community. It was us. All of us in the LGBT community.
We all did not do enough.
Many people in our community think the proposition was just about marriage. There are many people in our community who don't care about marriage. Fair enough... I get that. But they couldn't be more wrong. Marriage is the least of it. This is just the start, folks. This was about writing discrimination directly into our largest state's Constitution. The opposition is now emboldened. They will wield this like an axe mercilessly. They will go after the 18,000 same-sex marriages that have already taken place in California. They will go after same-sex benefits in the public sector much like they did in Michigan. They will try and minimize or even abolish any legal standing we have as couples and families. Laugh all you want, this is the truth. They will not stop. And neither should we.
We need to come together, organize better, educate more, raise more money, work our asses off and more of us need to vote. We need to be pro-active, not reactive, if we want our collective equality and justice. We need to take a look deep inside ourselves and ask ourselves, "how much do we want this?" No one else will give us our freedom. No one else will give us our equality. No one else will give us our deserved justice. We need to take it.
I went to bed on Tuesday night with hope in my heart over Obama's win, only to wake up back to earth on Wednesday shedding tears of sorrow. It's difficult to wrap your head around the fact that most people don't think we should have the same rights just because we are wired a certain way. But that's the truth of it and we need to recognize that, pick ourselves up and march forward.
We will need to do this ourselves. We can't expect anything from the next administration. They have too much else to deal with. We can't expect it from the courts. Much like the great work that the Pride Agenda is doing in New York but on a national level, we need to reach out to religious leaders, unions and workplaces. We need to educate, build bridges and alliances. We need to work, we need to spend money and we need to put in the time.
We need to go out there and educate people about why denying us equality is wrong. But it will take time, money and most importantly; commitment from our own community.
This article can also be found at www.davidmixner.com
Frank Selvaggi is Co Chair of the Empire State Pride Agenda and is an
activist for marriage equality. He lives in North Salem and works out of New York
City. He and his husband, Bill Shea, were married in Massachusetts and were
major donors to the No On 8 campaign.