It was a building under siege. Thousands of placard-wielding demonstrators chanted angrily behind police barricades set up outside a huge Mormon temple on New York’s plush Upper West Side.
The banners condemned the Church’s active sponsorship of the successful campaign to ban gay marriage in California. Michael Hogan, a gay illustrator who lived nearby, explained why he had joined the growing protest movement that swept across the US last week.
“It is important to be here,” he said. “We have to stand up.”
PHOTO: AP
The marriage ban has motivated gays in the US to protest perhaps more than any other event in recent times. Since the California ban was passed by a referendum on Nov. 4, huge protests have been staged in cities from San Francisco to Chicago to New York.
The scale of the protests has shocked many and led some commentators to compare it to the sort of communal political awakening that marked the birth of the civil rights movement. That was the tone of many of the banners and chants in the New York protest, which made references to the earlier struggle for black people’s rights.
“Gay, straight, black, white — marriage is a civil right!” went one chant.
One man carried a poster with the question: “Should we sit at the back of the bus too?”
Those words sent a powerful signal in a country that elected its first black president, Barack Obama, on the day of the ban and seemed poised to take a liberal turn in its politics. California’s passing of Proposition Eight, which in effect reversed an earlier move making gay marriage legal, was one of the few electoral disappointments for liberals. That the move should come in California — a state that is usually famed for its liberalism — was even more of a surprise.
“I was shocked at California. It was the one bad thing about election night,” Hogan said.
Organizers of the protests said that “Prop Eight” was simply encouraging hate and discrimination.
“Hatred has no place in society and it has no place in state constitutions,” said Corey Johnson, joint organizer of the New York demonstration.
If supporters of Prop Eight thought their victory would be accepted quietly, they were very wrong. It has opened a huge can of political worms. For many it showed how California, like the US itself, was still deeply divided over how to treat gay people. It split the Republicans, with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger opposing it and most of the conservative wing of his party campaigning for it.
It opened up a racial debate as many Hispanics and black voters, who tend to be politically liberal but socially conservative, voted for it. It also triggered a debate over the role of religion and the state as many churches fought to get the measure through.
Many of those churches were high-profile evangelical institutions that have long opposed any moves towards accepting gay marriage. But most of the outrage has focused firmly on the Mormon Church, whose members contributed more than US$20 million in support of Prop Eight.
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