Houston Democrats

One of the good things about Houston cable is that you can do much better targeting than say in Austin or San Antonio, because they have their network set up where you can get your ad only in front of the audiences you want it. Don't want to broadcast to blacks? Or just to certain age demographics? Odds are that you can do it with Houston cable. For that I am thankful because for this election, untargeted Broadcast Ads are NOT the way to win. There are very few areas where raising awareness of an actual election going on to the populace at large gets us a boost in turnout that actually help us.

Get the message, folks: It's cool if you want to preach tolerance. Just don't do it in my living room.

Let me be blunt. Winning the vote on an issue like this is largely an academic question. Prop two is going to pass and pass big no matter how tricky you are with the marketing. Karl and others who favor the stealth approach to campaigning can correctly argue that widely publicizing the largely gay vs antigay question at the heart of Prop Two will result in something like a three-to-one victory for the homophobes. The problem is that if those who vote on this question are composed entirely out of the motivated electorate, their victory will be closer to five- or four-to-one.

More Karl-Thomas:

Remember, in Texas, if we had Presidential level turnout, we'd be as much up shit creek with this Amendment as even Oregon was with their $2.4 million in aid from the NGLTF. It's not that we want low turnout either, we need the correct turnout. By making this big splash in the press about us running ads in Houston, not only are Houstonians aware of what's going on from the ads, but so is the rest of the state and those on the right that are paying attention to what we are up to. It's hard to ignore a fifth of a million dollars suddenly playing with Prop 2 turnout.

Why couldn't we have had $200,000 in aid for phone calls? Or direct mail? Or organizing on the ground? Or more focused radio or print advertising?

Allow me to paraphrase: Not in my living room. You people should stick to your own kind. Some of my best friends are gay, so don't call me a bigot. But why can't you people be more quiet about your lifestyle? Not that there's anything wrong with it.

The idea that the anti Prop Two campaign should stick to the closet is a little bit obnoxious. But the bigger problem with running a stealth campaign to support gay rights in a volitile homophobic state (like the land I love, for instance) is that it won't work. The hate-based fundamentalist vote in favor of prop 2 is already stirred up. They're already going to vote this turkey in and we're not going to stop them.

This is the equivalent of holding a school integration referendum in Alabama in 1950. The basic questions of justice, fairness, and human dignity aren't even agreed on yet. We will lose this vote. NGLTF at least seems to want to lose this vote semi-honestly. Their sad little $200K media buy maybe, maybe will help produce a close to majority rejection of Prop Two inside the 6-10 Loop. Outside the Loop it'll look more like a match up between the '79 Steelers and the '83 Oilers (with the anti-Prop Two side represented by the guys in the silky blue pastel numbers).

If anything, NGLTF is not getting enough into people's faces with their tv campaign. The only right way in a democracy to turn the issue of fairness around for our gay fellow citizens is to turn the hearts of the voters away from paranoia and toward simple economic justice. To do that, we shouldn't have gay people just showing up on television. We need to have gay people showing up at church picnics.

The message should be, "Look me in the eye. Tell me to my face my life partner shouldn't have survivor or health insurance benefits. Look my daughter in the eye and tell her the two fathers who love her are going to hell. Try and convince my son one of his two moms isn't his real mom." Confronting the outright wickedness of anti-gay discrimination isn't going to happen if gays just stick to their own kind. It's only going to happen if we show the world that gays are already part of us, that they are our neighbors and contributing to our communities right now and that legally snubbing them over and over is wrong. Being sneaky isn't just a losing strategy and it isn't just short sighted. It's also wrong for a democracy.

The Founding Fathers were terribly concerned in 1787 that a civic republic could not work as a form of government if people lived too far away from each other. Democracy works best when all citizens feel a level of identification with each other. It falls apart when we turn on each other. The only way justice will win out on all the "gay issues" (they're really civil rights issues) is thru gradualism, not legalism. We won't win this war by cleverer tactics. We'll only win by getting our more numerous opponents to quit the fight. And they'll only do that once they wake up and realize gay people are human, too.