Once a Local Legal Battle, Is Prop 8 On Its Way to 'Net-Fueled Cultural Moment?

Backers of California's Proposition 8, which enshrined a ban on same-sex marriages in the state constitution, scored a narrow victory on November 4th, winning 52.3% of the vote. The immediate impact in California is huge: the invalidation of 18,000 marriages. But that vote didn't put an end to the fierce debate, not even close. People have been protesting Prop 8's success in Los Angeles, San Diego, and, as the LA Times put it, "even Modesto." What was largely a state legal battle seems to be morphing into a national cultural moment, helped along by the web, including Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube.

Nationwide "Join the Impact" Rallies

In the days after the vote, Seattle activist Amy Balliett put up a website calling for others to Join the Impact against Prop 8. She told 365gay.com that she was amazed to soon find it pulling in some 50,000 hits per hour, crashing its server. The Join the Impact mission is to make communion with Prop 8 supporters, "to encourage our community to engage our opposition in a conversation about full equality and to do this with respect, dignity, and an attitude of outreach and education." Its success is reminiscent of Colombia's anti-FARC movement launched on Facebook that spawned protests all over the world:

"For me it’s second nature," says Balliett of social networking. "It's my job. I think: Need to organize an event? Use the Internet. Throw a party? Use Evite. Technology offers a platform on which to hold the conversation. It’s also given a platform for us to rally together and organize."

The Join the Impact group has launched visibility events to be held on November 15th across the country, putting out a call to "let the country hear our voices together. Let them see that we are a strong, adamant, and powerful community that deserves equal rights." That's a strategy supported by a recent critique of the anti-Prop 8 campaign by Jasmine Beach-Ferrara in The Democratic Strategist, which called for a unified grassroots approach. So far, 22,000 people have said they're attending local Join the Impact rallies. A rally in Hartford Connecticut, for example, already has 120 confirmed guests. One at City Hall in Fayetteville, Arkansas -- where adoption by same-sex couples was banned on the 4th -- has 14. Augmenting Join the Impact's Facebook strategy is the collaborative software Wetpaint.

Protesting the Mormon Church

Join the Impact organizer Balliett wants supporters to tame the urge to pin blame for Prop 8 on the Mormon Church, but not everyone is on board with that idea. A rally tonight in New York City at the Mormon Temple on the Upper West Side is expected to draw a quite a crowd.

The Utah-based Mormon Church is, when you boil it down, being targeted for its own success at social networking. San Francisco Catholic Archbishop George Niederauer, who had spent more than a decade in Salt Lake City, asked the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to pitch in against Proposition 8. In turn, the Mormon Church encouraged its members to support Prop 8 with the money and energy in a letter read to all California congregations. That brought in an estimated $20 million of contributions for the measure, which became public through a campaign finance database hosted by anti-8 forces.

And a new website called invalidateprop8.org sets up tax-deductable donations to legal aide groups fighting Prop 8 -- to be made in the name of Thomas Monson, president of the Mormon Church.

"Call in Gay" Day

A new Facebook group called "A Day Without a Gay" echoes the walkouts we saw during the massive immigration rallies of 2006, where people skipped work to both draw attention to the debate and show the economic impact of immigrants. More than 700 people have signed up to "call in gay" on December 10th. Perhaps owing to its misinterpretable name, the group was reportedly dropped by Facebook this morning for being "hateful, threatening, or obscene." I have a word out to Brock Ogletree, the group's creator, to find out more about what happened there.

A MySpace group with 620 members originally planned its own "Day Without a Gay" event for December 5th, but it quickly regrouped when organizers noticed that others events were forming around the web. It too is planning events for the 10th, noting that the day also happens to be International Human Rights Day.

Prop 8 Backers Also Know How to Network

Perhaps owing to the fact that things went their way on the 4th, the pro-Prop 8 folks have been quiet on the web of late. But before the vote, the coalition made good use of YouTube. In this "Yes on 8" video from the Mormon Church-led Preserving Marriage coalition, Prop 8 backers could be easily mistaken for a local gathering of Obama supporters. In a cozy living room littered with laptops, they talk about how empowered they feel by sharing their personal stories with one another. The overall feeling is one of community and connectedness.

One supporter, Kenny, sits at his MacBook saying "Everyone can do really well in their own field, so they should do what they do to promote Prop 8. For example, I'm an Internet guy. I can make websites, so I made a website...Write a blog, put it out there. Make a YouTube video." Says another smiling pro-Prop 8 organizer: "The Internet is such a great resource. We can really extend our nets that way."

But they have stiff competition on YouTube from Keith Olbermann, whose impassioned "special comment" (transcript) against Prop 8 has been reposted dozens of times. "They want what you want," says Olbermann. "A chance to be a little less alone in the world."