Toni Broaddus, of San Francisco-based Equality Federation, provides training materials to gay activist groups forming in GOP-dominated ‘red’ states. (Photo courtesy of Toni Broaddus)
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LOU CHIBBARO JR
Friday, January 26, 2007
A small corps of gay activists waged a near-futile battle during the past three years as voters approved a wave of state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage that spread from the South across the Great Plains to the upper mountain states.
By the end of 2006, voters in 27 states had passed such amendments, with all but four of them occurring in the conservative, Republican leaning states that the nation’s political pundits have designated as “red” states.
 In most of these states, especially the rural ones in the heartland, large-scale, statewide gay rights groups did not exist. While activists scrambled to put together campaigns to fight the amendments, political observers in the states described these efforts as “too little and too late.”
Now, as legislatures in those states begin their 2007 sessions, gay activists there say the marriage amendment battles appear to have prompted more participation and a greater resolve to strengthen the gay civil rights movement in these states.
“We took what they threw at us and we’re using it as a tool for organizing,” said lesbian activist Andrea Shipley, who serves on the board of an Idaho gay group called Your Family Friends & Neighbors.
“We want to get the word out that there are a lot of courageous people here ready to do the work needed to move ahead,” Shipley said.
Last November, Idaho voters passed an anti-gay marriage amendment by a margin of 63 percent to 37 percent.
According to Toni Broaddus, executive director of the Equality Federation, a coalition of state gay rights groups, Shipley and activists like her in Montana, South Dakota, Utah, and other red states have sounded the battle cry for a new era of gay activism in their respective states.
“The silver lining from these ballot measures is that they triggered the building of a GLBT movement in these states,” Broaddus said. “We may be losing these fights now, but we are building our capacity to grow and build more public support in the long run.”
But in the short run, experts in electoral politics say the prospects for fending off anti-gay bills and passing gay-supportive bills will remain difficult in most red states, including most states in the South.
“Activism is always helpful, but it won’t get you very far if you don’t have the demographics,” said Hastings Wyman, editor of Southern Political Report, a newsletter that follows political developments in southern states.
“Right now, even if you get all the gays in Mississippi organized, the powers that be will still vote against them,” Wyman said in referring to the Mississippi Legislature.
Yet Wyman and Broaddus, who closely monitors gay-related developments in red states, say there are exceptions to this trend that promise to provide some short-term gains for advocates of the rights of both gays and transgender citizens.
Wyman notes that North Carolina and Arkansas now have Democratic-controlled legislatures, and it may be possible to pass a bill banning employment discrimination based on sexual orientation in those states. Chances are less favorable for adding protection for transgender persons to such a bill, he said.
And while chances for passing a gay-related employment protection bill in the legislatures of other southern states are less favorable, Wyman said the election gains for Democrats in 2006 throughout the South could improve prospects for a federal gay civil rights bill. He said more Democratic senators in southern states are now likely to consider voting for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA, without being threatened with almost certain defeat in their next election.
An ENDA bill to be introduced in Congress this year is expected to call for banning discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and expression, terms that cover both gays and transgender persons.
Broadus said that, with the exception of Mississippi and Louisiana, gay and transgender activists in southern states either have or are in the process of forming statewide organizations that are becoming more sophisticated in their advocacy work with state legislatures. These groups are joining Broaddus’ San Francisco-based Equality Federation, which provides training materials for fundraising and other “infrastructure” skills needed to help build strong organizations.
The status of organizing among gays in the Great Plains and northern mountain states is less advanced, Broaddus and other activists have said.
The Equality Federation has lost contact with gay groups in Alaska, Wyoming, and North Dakota, a development indicating that once existing groups may no longer be active. As of this week, the group Equality North Dakota, for example, had not updated its website since February 2006. A call placed to a phone number listed on the site reached the cell phone of a North Dakota truck driver who said he never heard of the organization.
An informal Washington Blade survey of gay groups in rural, red states shows that other groups are active and have achieved some measurable success in their work.
In South Dakota, gay activists last year formed South Dakotans Against Discrimination to fight a ballot measure calling for a state constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. Voters approved the measure by a margin of 52 to 48 percent, a development that startled the state’s political establishment for its closeness.
Among the states that approved anti-gay marriage amendments last year, South Dakota came the closest to defeating the ballot measure, coming in second only to Arizona, which became the first state in history to defeat such an amendment in a statewide election.
“We appealed to people’s libertarian streak,” said 23-year-old John Hoadley, who coordinated South Dakotans Against Discrimination’s campaign opposing the amendment. “The tone of the state is ‘live and let live,’ and we tried to build on that,” he said.
“Before the amendment, we had no statewide group,” Hoadley said. “Now, we have a statewide GLBT organizing meeting scheduled in March.” He said activists throughout the state are fired up as a result of what many see as a victory of sorts over the close vote on the marriage amendment.
His Sioux Falls-based group will likely become a new statewide group called Equality South Dakota, Hoadley said, and will immediately begin lobbying for a state gay rights bill banning employment discrimination.
Broaddus said similar examples of small but encouraging stories of expanding activism have occurred in Utah, Iowa and Oklahoma, where anti-gay marriage amendments and a flurry of anti-gay bills introduced in state legislatures prompted activists to strengthen existing gay groups.
“We’ve got nowhere else to go but up,” said Laura Belmonte, president of the board of Oklahomans for Equal Rights. “The marriage issue was a disaster,” she said, noting that voter approval of a marriage ban by a 75 to 25 percent margin led to other anti-gay bills in the Oklahoma Legislature. Yet she remains optimistic.
“If you look at it another way, if we can mobilize 25 percent of the people to speak out on behalf of equality, it would change the momentum for us tremendously,” Belmonte said.
Similar to Iowa, where activists pushed through a gay non-discrimination law in Boise, Belmonte said activists in Oklahoma City and the cities of Norman, Stillwater and Tulsa are poised to work hard for gay non-discrimination ordinances in those places this year.
But information released by the Equality Federation shows that most gay advocacy groups in red states remain far behind their blue state counterparts in the Northeast and West Coast. Many rely solely on volunteers while others don’t have budgets to support anything more than a one or two-person staff.
Patrick Sammon, executive director of Log Cabin Republicans, a national gay group based in Washington, said his group is also encouraged over the growth in Log Cabin chapters in the GOP-dominated red states.
Among other things, Sammon said Log Cabin members have won election to Republican Party committees on the state and local level, where they have worked with GOP moderates to oppose anti-gay legislation. Texas, Indiana, Kentucky, and Virginia are among the red states where Log Cabin members have been making inroads in party organizations, he said.
John Marble, a spokesperson for National Stonewall Democrats, which represents gay Democrats, said more Stonewall chapters are also forming in red states.
“Fundamentally, equality is a 50 state fight,” Sammon said. “We won’t succeed until we move red states in our direction.”
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