[This post is one among scores hundreds of entries in Write to Marry Day, a blog carnival to support same-sex marriage and rally opposition to Prop 8, organized by Mike Rogers of PageOneQ and Dana Rudolph of Mombian.]

With the dutiful, if futile, determination of Sisyphus, I keep trying to find some words – the words — that will make a difference in the battle against California’s Proposition 8. The same series of thoughts have dogged me for weeks: if only I could string together the right reasoning, the sparkling jewels of argument, the compelling details of personal narrative. Real imagery of real people, good people, kind people, who deserve the preservation of this right. Lofty, heart-swelling reminders of what a Constitution is for, and a Supreme Court, and a Bill of Rights. The protection of individual and minority rights. The sanctity of church/state separation, for the love of both.  The stuff democracies are made of.  

If only I could convey these, I think, in the right tone.  If only they could somehow be put in front of the right people.  Enough of them.  Hell, even a handful.  Since all along we’ve known this will be won or lost by something like a handful of votes.

Compelling arguments for the retention of same-sex marriage abound, of course. Any whistle-stop tour of these should begin with the very finding of the California Supreme Court  that Proposition 8 seeks to override:

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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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The observant among you will have noticed that today I upped the goal on the LD Love Train fundraising thermometer.  That’s because we met the $5,000 goal last week, just under a month after we started.  And now, with a little over two weeks to go, the need is only stronger.

So I am going to redouble my efforts to spread the fundraising word as far as I possibly can, and I’m going to try to find new ways to help you to, as well (such as, for instance: want to post that fundraising thermometer on your blog?  WRITE ME AND I’LL SEND YOU THE CODE FOR IT).  

A lot can happen in two weeks.  Need convincing?  Just look at the past two weeks.

The No on 8 campaign is working very efficiently to turn donations into ads in critical areas, with a turnaround of just a few days.  They can make very practical use of donations all the way through November 1. 

For Californians who want to help but don’t know how beyond donating money (which, given how fiercely this is being fought with ads, is very important), I can immediately direct you here: volunteer, and spread the word.  Phone banks are happening up and down the state (big ole list here, click on the city nearest you to get further details).  Everyone who does calls is trained & oriented, and  you have moral support all around  you.  Can’t get out of the house but want to help on the phone?  Phone from home.  And house parties are hugely effective: you can raise funds, awareness, and work together on personal phone calls.  

Meanwhile, I want to thank everyone who has so brightened our own corner of the No on 8 fundraising.  Below, I’ve listed your names, what you said you did, and where you were from.  (Each is in alpha order; I culled the repeated names, locales, and occupations).

You are an amazing, inspiring bunch of people.  As Jake Goad said on Daily Kos today, 

 Have you ever wondered, if I had been an adult during the early days of the struggle for civil rights regardless of race, & of women’s rights/suffrage, would I have taken action or sat on the sidelines? Well this civil rights struggle is going on right now, this vote in CA is the battleground it is going to be fought on, & this is your last chance to move off the sidelines.

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With her permission, I’m posting a letter that my sister wrote to a friend of hers today. He’s the husband of one of her closest friends, and on the fence about Proposition 8.

I’ve changed the names of people she refers to, to protect their privacy. But my sister is so proud of me, and so committed to being an ally, that she wanted to be sure I kept her family’s names intact. 

I include it here for several reasons.   One: gay people usually come from straight families; if all goes well, we remain interwoven with one another our whole lives.  The stability of all our families extends beyond our own immediate nuclear units.  Two: if every sister or brother or mother or father or daughter or son of a gay person in California reached out to their fence-sitting friends and co-workers, I’ll bet there would be a sea change in this election.  There are upwards of 850,000 (and I mean way upwards: some estimate 2 million) of us in this state, after all.  That’s a lot of kindred.  And three: I’m every inch as proud of her as she is of me.  

[Photo: My sister and me, the eve of my commitment ceremony.   David Rae Morris, 1997.]

From: Anne
Subject: Yes on Love
To: [The husband of one of her closest friends]
Date: Tuesday, October 14, 2008,

Dear [Friend],

I’m stretching my neck out, and only doing this because I care deeply about you as the loving half of a couple who mean the world to me. You two are essential in my survive my life with some grace kit. Your empathy is spontaneous and spot on. So here goes.

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