Zero to activist in 60 seconds. Why prop. 8 was my fault, and the road ahead.

I sat there alone on my couch the night of the election with my finger on refresh hitting it every minute or two watching one state turn red or blue, one after another with dispassionate curiosity. That outcome was not a surprise but I could feel the excitement just beyond the walls of my home from the horns and the music and sounds of jubilation and I could feel the weight of all of future history leaning on that moment.
And then there was another moment. The moment I realized there were no longer enough votes left uncounted to defeat prop. 8, and I felt another weight. In the span of about a minute a series of emotions spun around in my head like a compass needle trying to find true north. It started with shock, then loss and sadness, anger then a moment later it gravitated to determination. I was determined that I would not allow this. In that magnetic moment was an epiphany that I was complicit in what had just occurred. I had sat back and observed dispassionately while my own civil rights were being taken away. I knew the ad campaign against prop. 8 was impotent, putting all its weight on theoretical arguments about unfairness. I knew people needed to see the other people that were going to be hurt because that is how humans form empathy.
I had sat back and waited it out thinking the trajectory of history was set and that progress always won out over intolerance, safe in my assumption that there was no way California would turn its back on its own. Oh how was I wrong. The march of equality had just taken a U turn and rights that people had were just snatched away, because I was uninvolved when I had known what was right. I think a great many others felt the same way that night. I started designing protest signs before I even fell asleep that night.
Remarkably I was not surprised in the ensuing days about news reports of spontaneous protests all over the country. There was a change in the ether that everybody else could feel too. Our little state had been the nucleus on which an entire civil rights movement had crystallized in a matter of hours. Our brothers and sisters in hundreds of cities across this country and in many others rallied to our cause. They had looked to us in the hope of their own equality and now it was they who were supporting us. This is a debt we can never forget or ever fully repay. Equality will come to California, sooner than in many other states, but we cannot be content with merely setting an example. No person will be fully free as long as they can step into another state and loose their status as an equal.
This is a fight that cannot end until it has gone to every single state and been won in every state, and to Peurto Rico and to Guam and to American Samoa, until every human being under our flag is an equal. The counter-currents of progress have always been present and they run strong. Achieving equality is not an end unto itself as we have seen, it must be also maintained. It is a struggle that will never really be over.
In these few weeks since the election my experiences have paralleled those of many others. I attended my first rally, I confronted my first public official and I have planned. My determination has not decreased, it has just become familiar. It’s been broken in like a comfortable shoe. The road ahead is long but the course is set. All we need is a compass and a good pair of shoes.

Prop 8 supporter FOTF implodes from expense of its support

This group gave 1,000,000 + to support prop 8 and runs homosexual conversion programs and now had to fire 200 employees. Now those good hatemongering parents will have to get real jobs to feed their “real” families. Karma anyone?



http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2008/11/20/focus-on-the-family-lays-off-200-employees-endangering-marriage/



p.s. OMG MARGARET FREAKING CHO!!!!!!!

Homophobic city councilmen gets called out at meeting.

Homophobic city councilmen gets called out at meeting.

Tonight I addressed the Woodland City Council to ask for an acknowledgement of the intrinsic equality of all people and express my outrage at the actions of a member of that council. The council is supposed to speak for all residents, but one of them, Dr. William Marble, has decided which group he does not speak for. Even as a city councilmen, in his own name (and others), donated money to support prop 8. Herein lays the conflict of interest. This is not supporting a presidential candidate or a bullet train; this is actively working to demote a subset of your constituents to a legally inferior status. It doesn't make me angry that this guy hates the gays. It makes me angry that he is supposed to represent all of us and yet he shamelessly, in the full light of public scrutiny, works to hurt members of our city's populous. It seemed to me to fall on deaf ears but I hope at least I planted a seed in the minds of a few people there that intolerance among our elected members of government, at any level, is NOT OK.
If you too are bothered by this, then do no patronize William Marble DDS.
Below is the text of my address.


My name is Brad Townsley.
I am a PhD student at UCDavis and I represent only myself.
I am a life long resident of Woodland and a second-class citizen.
I am here to ask that our city follow many others and join the suit against proposition 8, the initiative robbing hundreds of thousands of their legal rights. I am also here to express my profound shock and disappointment that a member of the city council of Woodland has acted against the well being of residents of this city. The council members should act in the best interest of all of the many diverse and overlapping groups that make up our community, including its minorities. Councilmen Bill Marble has acted to hurt a specific minority group of our city’s population, in donating a substantial sum of money to support the ballot initiative which codified discrimination against a selected minority group into our states constitution.

Freedom to hold an opinion, even one which is offensive or prejudiced, is one of our most cherished and fundamental rights. This however was a tangible and calculated act, which was intended to do harm to members of our community. This action clearly communicates the sentiment by Councilmen Marble to many of us that, “I do not represent you because you are a lesser being, and undeserving the basic rights that I myself take for granted”.

Well, I do not view myself as a lesser being and I do not see others as needing protection from my civil equality. The foes of civil rights for gay and lesbian Californians espouse a position which veils itself in the flimsiest of sophistries. The justifications rest on false logic and words like choice and tradition. No cognitive scientist or neurobiologist will endorse “choice” as a hypothesis for homosexuality. And an argument resting on “tradition” is patently offensive. Can discrimination be justified solely by the fact that it already exists? Can its prior existence be taken as evidence of its rightness? “It is because it’s right, and it’s right because it is.” This is the same kind of circular illogic that relegated millions to slavery and apartheid. Or there’s the ever present reference to morality, which only means precisely whatever the person invoking it, wants it to mean.

I reject the bizarre rational that a slim majority has decided on the issue of denying equal rights to others. This cuts at the very heart of our form of governance. The purpose of a constitution and for a representative republic is, per the wisdom of our founders, to protect the rights of the minority against the whim of the majority. In 1948 California became the first state to strike down the anti-miscegenation laws barring interracial marriages, a freedom opposed by 9 in 10 Americans at the time. How many in 2008 would hold that the “whim” of the people then should have superseded this act of “judicial activism”. How many people now would not have their relationships recognized because their ethnicities differ. Hearts may not be changed, but minds can. Let’s do what we KNOW is right, however we happen FEEL.

I ask this council to support civil equality for all Woodlanders and Californians, and let it be known that disdainment against the minority is not a sentiment endorsed by this city. Join with other cities in denouncing inequality.

Thank you.



Pro proposition 8 contributions

Contributor name William Marble
Occupation Dentist
Employer WILLIAM L. MARBLE DDS INC.
City Woodland
State or country CA
ZIP 95695
Position Support
Amount $250.00
Payment type Monetary
Transaction date 8/1/2008
Committee name PROTECTMARRIAGE.COM - YES ON 8, A PROJECT OF CALIFORNIA RENEWAL

Contributor name William Marble
Occupation Dentist
Employer WILLIAM L. MARBLE DDS INC.
City Woodland
State or country CA
ZIP 95695
Position Support
Amount $250.00
Payment type Monetary
Transaction date 8/26/2008
Committee name PROTECTMARRIAGE.COM - YES ON 8, A PROJECT OF CALIFORNIA RENEWAL

Contributor name Sandra Marble
Occupation Receptionist
Employer WILLIAM L. MARBLE, DDS INC.
City Woodland
State or country CA
ZIP 95695
Position Support
Amount $4,500.00
Payment type Monetary
Transaction date 9/7/2008
Committee name PROTECTMARRIAGE.COM - YES ON 8, A PROJECT OF CALIFORNIA RENEWAL

California’s constitution: prop 8 is un-Californian

There is such divisive fervor about the changing of our state constitution to discriminate against homosexual Californians. I wonder if people had bothered to read the constitution they have voted to mutilate if we would be in this situation. Probably, not. So here is section 1 of article 1 of the California constitution and I ask you to read it and understand its intent.

CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTION: ARTICLE 1
DECLARATION OF RIGHTS
SECTION 1
“All people are by nature free and independent and haveinalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life andliberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuingand obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.”

When this election is certified, think about what it means to corrupt the charter document of this great state, epicenter of culture, technology and commerce and the forerunner of the civil rights movement, with institutionalized prejudice. When this act of bigotry is instilled into our defining document, ask yourself what it means for you to be a Californian. Are we a people who fight to expand the circle of equality only just far enough so that it encompasses ourselves and then no further? Or, as I believe, do we demand that it grow to encircle all of our human brethren?

In the wisdom of our forbearers, the first section, in the first article of the California constitution is our Declaration of Rights. The first words in this declaration are “All people”, and these words are not followed by “except”. Who among us would not, at some other time or place have fallen under that “except”. How passionately do you believe that you are entitled the same rights and protections as the majority? Now compare, how passionately do you believe that those rights be extended to another?

We as a state, so many times and requiring such great personal and financial sacrifice, have made the decision to do what is right for animals, for the environment and for our collective future. Now, when it cost nothing to do what was right for those Californians for whom the majority did not count them selves among, many in our state forgot our true character and failed to recognize the humanity of the people affected by their action.

I know California and I know her people, they would not act to dispossess a minority. With our long history of civil rights let us ask, how we may grow our circle. And those inside, reach across and help us back in. We are all Californians, and in that we are all the same.


“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Martin Luther King Jr. August 1967