Sign the Petition - Save Thousands of Marriages
New TNG Editorial Assistant Jenna will break your heart (in a catchy, pop way) with the following post. Please sign the petition to the California Supreme Court asking them to invalidate Prop 8.
One of the most memorable ads that came out of the Prop 8 fight was “Home Invasion,” a video produced by the Courage Campaign, a California non-profit that works to advance a progressive agenda in its state. The video featured a group of Mormon missionaries trespassing in the home of a lesbian couple before finding and tearing up their marriage license. The video’s message—that Prop 8 threatens the privacy and security of real Americans—was effective and moving, but its emphasis on the Mormon Church drew strong objections from the usual suspects.
The Courage Campaign is back with another video, this time linked to a petition asking the CA Supreme Court to invalidate Prop 8.
Now, I'd be lying if I said that I didn't cry easily. Sad movies, Hallmark ads—and even that stupid ASPCA commercial with the Sarah McLaughlin soundtrack—make me tear up so readily that I've just come to accept it as a part of my life. Given my propensity for emotion, I should have known better than to watch the Courage Campaign’s video that was forwarded to me the other day with the tag line "be careful, this will break your heart" at work. But I watched it, and like many of the roughly quarter million other people who’ve seen it by now, I cried.
Shortly after Election Day, the Courage Campaign asked for same-sex couples that were married in California before Prop 8 passed to submit photographs of themselves and their families with a simple tag line: Don’t Divorce Us.
This new video is a compilation of the photographs the Courage Campaign received set to Regina Spektor’s “Fidelity” and the finished product is absolutely haunting. One of the things I love most about it is that it takes the abstract call for equality that marked the fight against Prop 8 and brings it down to earth by completely humanizing it. The people in the video were hurt by Prop 8. They are couples and parents and siblings and children and they were all directly touched by the discrimination that has been enshrined in the California Constitution. In addition, it touches on the same theme that “Home Invasion” first raised. The lack of marriage rights is, for millions of Americans, a denial of very real safety and security. And there is nothing abstract about that.
Watch the video above, and then go to the Courage Campaign’s website to sign their petition calling on the CA Supreme Court to invalidate Prop 8.
3 comments:
Watched this video the other day... it's a total tearjerker. And I think you're right to point out that it effectively humanizes the situation.
It maybe makes it just a little harder for homophobes to disregard our families if they see how loving and happy they can be.
This is a great way to put a human face on the issue, though I doubt that homophobes will sit and watch it for three and a half minutes.
I think this is more effective at preaching to the choir. Which is great, and needed, but only in doses. Unfortunately the gay movement tends to focus almost exclusively on preaching to the choir while ignoring the tougher job of designing effective messages to reach people who aren't already 100% with us. We need no better object lesson on that than Prop 8.
And the Courage Campaign's "Home Invasion" ad was the worst of the self-indulgent choir-preaching that helped lose Prop 8. I'm surprised you thought it was effective, Jenna. It made a good point, but did it so ham-handedly that it was counterproductive. Besides the awful acting, it was a mean-spirited and negative ad that did nothing to change minds or challenge the reams of lies coming out of Yes on 8. I hope we've all learned from the Californian debacle that petulance is not a winning tactic.
But I signed their petition anyway, what the hey.
The saddest (sickest?) part of it all it that we posit a vote on family rights right next to votes on property taxes, school levies, and HOV lane issues.
We ALLOWED a vote on our family's legal worth.
We should have rioted in the streets the minute things like PROP 8 appeared, refusing to have our civil rights voted upon. But not enough of us suffer due to inequality; too many of us are VERY comfortable.
I'll take my fellow gays seriously when they start organizing sit-ins, tax protests, and start blocking traffic and using our very bodies to scream "ENOUGH!" to society and lawmakers.
Until then, we are largely a timid, pathetic bunch who plead and beg for rights as if we don't believe we actually deserve them in the first place. We feel we have to be "liked enough", and not appear "too demanding" or "too angry" so we can EARN the right to protect our families from suffering, distress, and harm in times of disease, divorce, and death.
We Don't Know Any Better.
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