For the fun of it, I had to do a side-by-side “before” and “after” shot.  

Yay people!  We cracked 10 G’s!  For morale-boosting purposes, I think we should leave that nice brilliant “we did it!” thing up there for the weekend.  But I just might be tempted to “mush” us on further next week.  Just saying.

[By the way: another long list of (first) names, hometowns, and gigs will be forthcoming next week, including those who got us to our first goal of $5,000, and those who brought us to our second of $10,000.  But I have a sweetie's 40th birthday to celebrate this weekend, so it'll take a few days.]

A few additional notes (okay, more than a few): First off, my sister, who, in cahoots with her Norski spouse and my Pops, essentially contributed 10% of this goal this time around (yep: they went back and donated again, this time shelling out a cool thousand dollars), came up with a great idea for those of us digging extra, extra deep:  Holiday cards printed with either “WE WON!” or “WE TRIED!” on them!  Since that’s pretty much all she’s going to be able to afford to send around this year.

I think it’s a smashing idea.  As soon as I’ve dusted myself off after this much-unwanted roller coaster ride, I just might try to bust out a line in time for holiday gift card giving.

I’m also glad it was her that broke the quadruple-digit donation barrier. Because on my No on 8 catch-all page,  while admiring the inventiveness of the lesbian cabal in the very effective 8against8 campaign, I quipped that for “Quadruple digit donors, I’ll legally change my kids’ names to whatever you want.”  Fortunately for me, I can suggest to my sister that she already shares the same last name as my kids.  She might be okay with that.

Another note is: we absolutely mustn’t let up.  A recently released poll by the Public Policy Institute of California found slightly more in opposition to the proposition (52%) than in favor of it (44%).   

But the landscape looks different through other lenses.  Two other polls put the “Yes” vote on Proposition 8 in the lead:

A poll by Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., conducted this month for the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic group that has put more than $1.2 million into the effort to pass the measure, showed Prop. 8 ahead 52 to 43 percent. A SurveyUSA poll done last week for a group of California TV stations had Prop. 8 with a narrow lead of 48 to 45 percent.

Regardless of the difference in method or reputation between the various polls, the upshot is that the electorate is enormously conflicted over this, and remains still fairly evenly divided, especially when you consider the “gay Bradley” effect, or whatever you want to call it.  No, I’m not saying former L.A. mayor Tom Bradley was gay.  No.  Just, you know, the social stigma of admitting to your bigotry over the phone keeps our polling numbers as unpredictable as those for candidates of color, to the tune of 7-10%, as we have found in all the past anti-gay marriage ballot measures over recent years.  

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[Part one of a two-part post.]

Last week I hit a nadir about all this Proposition 8 malarkey. It was a bad one, if something like a nadir can be characterized on a relative scale. It was close to noon (Tuesday, actually), and I was in a crazed wind tunnel in front of my computer, doing something that, at the time, I was certain was critical — critical! — to the unholy war being waged against my family in this state. For want of a horseshoe the horse was lost, etc.

My so-adorable-he-should-be-illegal, so-adorable-he’d-stop-traffic-if-only-he-were-tall-enough-for-traffic-to-see-him son wanted me to pay attention to him. He was tired, needing his midday nap. He wanted to be rocked in my lap, sucking on my pinkie.  It’s our special ritual, his most favored angle of repose, irrevocable proof that he’s Baba’s Little Boy. But there I was feverishly typing, repeatedly turning him away. The more insistent he got, the more frustrated I got. He grabbed my hand from the keyboard, and I snatched it back and barked at him. He looked at me with amazement, and then began to cry.

The accute irony was not lost on me, even in the moment. The poignance, all around. Me feeling for all the world that I was trying to save him — him! — from the macro forces of hatred, and him, feeling with all 25 pounds of his being that all he really needed was a nap, and my tender loving care.

I picked him up and rocked him, sang our special lullaby (“Where are you going, my little one, my little one/ where are you going, my darling, my own/ turn around and you’re three/turn around and you’re four/ turn around and you’re a young man going out of the door”). Any parent knows that we rock our children and sing to them for two very practical reasons: one, it comforts them. Two, it comforts us.

After I laid him asleep in his crib, I called my beloved and asked to be relieved of childcare for a portion of the afternoon so that I could try to collect myself. In over four years of parenting, I have never come to such a point. She lost several hours of income, an amount roughly equivalent to umpity-ump lawn signs, or another few seconds of No on 8 ad time in a big market, whatever.

Scenes like this are repeated all up and down the state. Lesbian and gay parents like me, currently married, feverishly working to retain that very civil right. We do so, more than any other reason, out of a sense of protectiveness of our kids, and we are either (a) working our @sses off, (b) freaking out, or (c) doing both, alternately.

Up and down the state, for the next two weeks, parents like me — as well as our friends, family, and allies — are staying up late, calling and writing everyone we know, begging them to write everyone they know. “Vote down the ballot!” we say. “Don’t forget about us when Obama is called the winner before the California polls close!” we say.  ”Please, please consider doing without your Starbucks for just this next two weeks, and donate that money so we can get the truth into the ears of the overwhelmed 9% who still don’t know how they’ll go with this.”

“Please, I’m begging you,” we say. And we mean it.

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[Part 2 of a two-parter. Parental gut-check (1) here.]

It’s not just a fight to preserve our legal right to marriage; it’s not just that domestic partnership will do okay ’til we get this all fixed up in another five or ten years. Straight ally folks keep telling me that, and I appreciate the good cheer. Hell, my sweetie tells me that. She says, “The same people who love or hate us on November 3rd will love or hate us on November 5th, regardless of whether or not we’re legally recognized as a family.” “Two steps forward, one step back,” all that.  But I’ve read too much from people in Massechusetts and Canada, reports that confirm my suspicion that equal legal recognition for same-sex partnerships does have a social and cultural impact. It does speed the process by which a group previously discriminated against becomes seen as worthy, equal, not wrong.

We don’t even need to limit the inquiry to Massechusetts and Canada. We could just ask any oldster who lived in the Jim Crow South, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. Birmingham, Alabama, before that righteous bunch of people rose up and said NO. No more. And they made personal sacrifice on an order that ought to inspire all of us way past doing without this or that latté.

One of the finest first person narrative accounts of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s (Howell Rains’ My Soul is Rested) takes its title from a telling interchange quoted by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his March 25, 1965 speech “Our God is Marching On!” He is speaking of the third legendary march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

Sister Pollard said a seventy-year-old Negro woman who lived in this community during the bus boycott and one day, she was asked while walking if she didn’t want to ride. And when she answered, “No,” the person said, “Well, aren’t you tired?” And with her ungrammatical profundity, she said, “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.” (Yes, sir. All right) And in a real sense this afternoon, we can say that our feet are tired, (Yes, sir) but our souls are rested.

That I am inspired by Dr. King, even when others may use his words to different ends in California churches these days, is but one of the hundred ironies drenching this Proposition 8 battle.

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